
Class '!'_, 

Book i_ 

ftpightF. 



COKfR'GIlT DEPOSIT. 



ST. PAUL THE HERO 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

HBW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO • DALLAS 
ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO 

MACMILLAN & CO., Limited 

LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA 
MELBOURNE 

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. 

TORONTO 



ST. PAUL THE HERO 



BY 

RUFUS M. JONES 

Author of "The Inner Life," etc. 



ILLUSTRATED 



Km fork 

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

1917 

All rights reserved 



0^ 



*%1 



Copyright, 1917 
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 



Set up and electrotyped. Published, March, 1917. 



MAR 29 1917 
©CI.A4G0077 

n^ ( > 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER 

I The Boy of Ten Years . 

II His Heroes 

III In Jerusalem 

IV In Rabbi Gamaliel's School . 
V Tent-Making In Tarsus 

VI The Great Teacher of Galilee 

VII In Jerusalem Again .... 

VIII The Man with a Shining Face 

IX On the Road to Damascus . 

X In Arabia 

XI Fifteen Wonderful Days . 

XII The First Great Missionary Journey 

XIII The First Great Problem . 

XIV A Letter to His Churches . 
XV " Come Over Into Macedonia 

Help Us " 

XVI Alone In Athens 

XVII Corinth and Ephesus . 

XVIII " Ready to Be Bound " . v . 

XIX In the Prison at Caesarea . 

XX The Stormy Journey to Rome . 

XXI The Triumph of the Hero . 



AND 



PAGE 

I 
9 
17 
25 
32 
40 
48 
55 
63 
73 
80 
88 

97 
104 

in 
119 
126 

139 
148 

157 
165 



PICTURES AND MAPS 

Tarsus Frontispiece 

FACING 

PAGE 

Falls of the Cydnus 3 

Antioch 88 " 

Map [North East Corner Medit.] 94 

Map [2nd Missionary Journey] 112 

Mars Hill, Athens 122 

Ephesus 129 

Temple of Diana 137 1 



ST. PAUL THE HERO 



ST. PAUL THE HERO 



THE BOY OF TEN YEARS 

"FATHER, who made the mountains that 
reach clear up into the sky over there where 



the sun goes down in the west?" 

"It was God, my dear little boy. Don't 
you remember the psalm we read in the syna- 
gogue last week: 'I will lift up mine eyes 
unto the mountains, from whence cometh my 
help. My help cometh from the Lord who 
made the heavens and the earth'? God made 
the Taurus Mountains on the west of our dear 
city and He made those peaks of the Amanus 
you see off there in the East, over which the 
storks fly in the autumn, and He made this 
wonderful river, the Cydnus, which dashes 



2 ST. PAUL THE HERO 

through the cleft in the mountains and makes 
those great waterfalls which you love and 
which rushes headlong through the city on its 
way to the blue sea." 

"Well, Father, He must be wonderful if 
He did that! But I don't see how He ever 
could spread out this great blue tent of a sky 
over all these fields and over all the city and 
over both the mountain ranges and as far as 
men have ever been. All the way to holy 
Jerusalem it goes — and farther, to Alexan- 
dria where the man lives, who wrote the book 
you read to me yesterday. Is there any end 
to that tent and what is it made of? Nobody 
in all our province of Cilicia can weave tent- 
cloth like that!" 

"No, my son, nobody has ever found an 
end to the tent of the sky. It covers the whole 
world. It is harder to get to the end of it 
than it is to go to the end of the rainbow, 
which you tried to find a few days ago. But, 
my dear boy, God has made something more 



THE BOY OF TEN YEARS 3 

wonderful than the mountains, more wonder- 
ful than the river, more wonderful even than 
the blue canopy of the sky, that covers the 
world." 

"What can it be, Father, that is more won- 
derful than these things? Do you mean the 
sea, which you sail over when you go as a 
pilgrim to holy Jerusalem, to the passover?" 

"No, not the sea, though that is wonderful 
and dreadful. I mean the law which God 
wrote with His own finger and gave to our 
great prophet Moses. That is God's greatest 
gift to our race. I want my little boy to love 
the beauty of the mountains and the river and 
the sky and the sea. But beyond all things, 
I want him to love the holy law of God, to 
learn it by heart, to keep every word of it and 
to grow up and be one of Jehovah's own men. 
My boy comes of the tribe of Benjamin, the 
favourite of all the sons of our father Jacob, 
and some day this little boy may become the 
leader and deliverer of God's longsuffering 



4 ST. PAUL THE HERO 

people. Will little Saul promise to be Je- 
hovah's man, and will he always love and 
keep the whole law which our God gave to 
Moses?" 

"Will it be very hard to do, Father, 
and must I give up all the things I like to 
do?" 

"Yes, my dear boy, it will often be very 
hard and you will have to give up some 
things you like to do. But if you keep the 
whole law of God and make yourself perfect 
and do everything God asks you to do in the 
holy law, all the people of our race forever 
will call you blessed, and you will be the hero 
of the tribe of Benjamin, and you will help to 
bring the Messiah for whom we long and 
pray, and Jehovah will give you eternal life 
in His kingdom." 

"Oh, Father, I don't care how hard it is, 
I will do it. I will let my pet stork out of 
his cage, so that he can fly off with the other 
storks over the mountains. I will not do one 



THE BOY OF TEN YEARS 5 

single thing on the holy Sabbath that is wrong. 
I will not play by the river any more with 
little Gentile boys. I will learn every word of 
Moses' law and say it all to mother when she 
puts me to bed. I will be ready to serve my 
race when God calls for some one to do the 
great deed, as David did in the book we 
read." 

His father patted his boy on the head and 
smiled, as they walked home along the banks 
of the rushing Cydnus and looked off at the 
sun-lit tops of the Taurus Mountains. 

Little Saul had had ten birth-days and he 
had already caught the spirit of his race 
which was very strong in his father and 
mother who kept feeding him on the stories 
of the past and waking in him the desire to be 
the hero of his tribe. Tarsus, a beautiful 
city of the province of Cilicia, was his home. 
The city was twelve miles from the Medi- 
terranean Sea and ships came up the river to 
the great wharves on either bank. Not far 



6 ST. PAUL THE HERO 

away to the south was the great island of Cy- 
prus and through a pass in the Amanus 
Mountains a road went to Jerusalem and the 
land of his fathers. He had been often ill 
and weak during the ten years he had lived 
and often he had lain by the window and 
looked out on the world and wondered. 
More than once he had seen an army go 
marching up the street, carrying the Roman 
eagles and flashing Damascus blades in the 
sun. He wondered where they were going 
and what they would do with these terrible 
swords. 

He had an older sister who was too old to 
play games with him, but she took him on 
walks by the river and like everybody else 
she told him Hebrew stories about the heroes 
he loved. She would picture to him often a 
city on a great hill, with valleys running 
round it; with a gorgeous temple in it, and 
she would say, "Some day you and I will go 
there to live and that will be our home and we 



THE BOY OF TEN YEARS 7 

shall be where we can see the temple of God 
every day!" 

SauPs father was proud of many things. 
He had married a wise and beautiful woman, 
of his own tribe, who made his home a very 
happy one. He was proud of his wife. He 
was proud of this strange boy who pondered 
and wondered and who promised to become 
some day a great Rabbi and leader. He was 
proud of his tribe and of his race. He was 
still more proud to be a Pharisee and to be 
classed among those who strictly kept the law 
and worshipped every least letter of it, and 
then he was proud that he was a Roman citi- 
zen. He had done some service to the em- 
pire and the great honour of being enrolled a 
citizen had been conferred upon him, so that 
little Saul had been born a Roman citizen and 
had received a double name, one for his home 
people — Saul, and one for Roman citizens to 
call him by, Paul, which meant, "the little 
one." 



8 ST. PAUL THE HERO 

This was the boy who talked with his fa- 
ther by the shore of the Cydnus, one evening 
about twenty years after Christ was born in 
Bethlehem. 



II 

HIS HEROES 

MONTHS passed by and the little boy of 
Tarsus grew stronger and more eager and 
earnest. His father had sailed from the port 
of Messina for Tyre and Ptolemais and Caesa- 
rea, on his way to Jerusalem to keep the Pass- 
over in the Holy Land. Little Saul had 
begged to be taken with him that he might 
see the Temple and stand on the very ground 
over which the great heroes of his race had 
walked, but he was told that he must wait un- 
til he was a few years older and then he should 
go to Jerusalem to study with a great Rabbi 
who could answer all his questions. For a 
long time he had gazed at the sky where the 
sun had gone down over the Taurus. He was 
really not looking at anything — he was just 

9 



io ST. PAUL THE HERO 

gazing off into space and wondering. He 
wondered whether he would ever see the 
world beyond those mountains, the world he 
had heard men talk about, the world of Asia 
and Greece and Rome. Then he turned to 
look toward the dim, yet shimmering peaks in 
the East and he wondered whether he would 
some day climb those ranges and go through 
the pass into Syria and on into the land he 
loved best — the real world of his own race. 

He had not yet read any of the stories of 
Greece. He had dimly heard of the Trojan 
war, but it was only a name of little meaning. 
Theseus and Jason and Achilles and Ulysses 
were not his heroes. They were never men- 
tioned in his home, though he sometimes 
heard the boys in the street speak of them. 
His heroes had all lived over the other moun- 
tains. Their names he heard almost every 
day. They were household words. He 
sometimes made believe that he was David and 
he would run with a little hand sling and kill 



HIS HEROES ii 

again the mighty Philistine giant that threat- 
ened his people. When he climbed a high 
hill-top he imagined himself Moses on Nebo, 
looking over Jordan on the wonderful land of 
promise, and every peak covered with a cloud 
that looked like smoke seemed to him once 
more Sinai, with the Lord above giving the 
law in the darkness and the thunder. He 
wished he could see the Seraphim as Isaiah 
did, with two wings over their faces, and two 
wings all the way down to their feet and two 
wings moving like a bird's to carry them 
wherever the Lord willed them to go. And 
still more he wished that he could see that 
wonderful figure which Ezekiel saw by the 
river Chebar — a living creature with the face 
of a man, and a calf and a lion and an eagle, 
all woven in and out with wings and all full 
of eyes, flashing like lightning, whirling like 
wheels, and moving wherever the Spirit of 
God carried the strange living creature. He 
thrilled whenever he heard the story of Daniel 



12 ST. PAUL THE HERO 

and he wondered whether he himself would 
have dared to pray to Jehovah and go to the 
lions for it. He had seen a lion once who 
was being carried to Ephesus in a cage, to be 
let out in the amphitheatre. The lion roared 
and shook his cage and showed his terrible 
teeth. Then little Saul thought of calm, 
brave Daniel going down into a den full of 
beasts like that. 

And Shadrach, Meshach and Abed-nego, 
the three heroes of the burning fiery furnace, 
were men he loved to hear about. "Be it 
known unto thee O King, that we will not 
serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image 
which thou hast set up." Those words al- 
ways stirred him like a trumpet. And he 
waited every time to hear once more about 
one like unto a son of God walking with these 
brave Jews in the midst of Nebuchadnezzar's 
fire. But best of all he liked the story of the 
faith of great father Abraham. He could al- 
most see him laying the sticks of wood on the 



HIS HEROES 13 

altar and binding his own only boy upon them. 
He wondered if his father would have done it 
with him, if he heard the Lord tell him to do 
it! Then suddenly came the joyous relief: 
the ram in the thicket, and little Isaac spared, 
just as the dreadful knife flashed in the air. 

These heroes were going in procession 
through his mind as he gazed at the eastern 
gate in the mountains through which the road 
ran that led on toward the one city of all the 
world. Just then his mother stood by his side 
and took his hand in hers. She could see that 
big thoughts were moving in him and she felt 
a kind of awe as she looked down at the pale 
earnest face. 

"Mother, which is the hardest of all the 
commandments to keep — I mean, really to 
keep, and not to break at all?" 

In her mind, the fond Jewish mother 
standing in the dusk by the boy she loved, ran 
over all the commandments. "Thou shalt 
not have any other gods but Jehovah." 



H ST. PAUL THE HERO 

"Thou shalt not make any graven image." 

"Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord 
thy God in vain." 

"Thou shalt observe the Sabbath day and 
keep it holy." 

"Thou shalt honour thy father and mother." 

"Thou shalt do no murder." 

"Thou shalt not commit adultery." 

"Thou shalt not steal." 

"Thou shalt not bear false witness." 

"Thou shalt not covet, or desire." While 
she was thinking how to answer, little Saul 
said: "I know which is the easiest." 

"And which is it?" asked his mother. 

"Thou shalt honour thy father and mother. 
It is the easiest thing there is to do. I don't 
have to stop to think to do that! It is not so 
easy, though, to keep the Sabbath day holy. 
There are so many things to remember. Now 
that I have let my pet stork go, I do not feel 
tempted any more to play with him on the 
Sabbath day. But sometimes I start off for a 



HIS HEROES 15 

walk before I think, and I carry things that 
are too heavy to be lifted on the Sabbath day. 
I wonder if I shall ever get so righteous, like 
our great Hebrew saints, that I shall not do 
anything wrong on the Sabbath day. It is 
very, very hard to be perfectly good. Do you 
not think, Mother, that this is the hardest of 
all the commandments to keep?" 

"No, my dear Saul, there is one which you 
will find much harder to keep. It is the last 
one in the list: "Thou shalt not want things 
— thou shalt not desire." This commandment 
has to do with what goes on inside. All the 
others are about things we do in the world 
outside. This one is in there where you 
think. It says that you must rule your own 
spirit and not want or desire what you ought 
not to have or ought not to do. That my lit- 
tle boy, as he grows larger, will find very hard 
indeed to keep. Only the great God who 
guided Abraham our father all the way from 
Ur of the Chaldees to the dear land of Canaan 



16 ST. PAUL THE HERO 

can help my boy to keep that commandment." 
"Anyway I shall try, mother. It isn't any 
harder is it than going into a den of lions or 
into Nebuchadnezzar's fiery furnace?" 

"Ah, but my Saul will never have any such 
dreadful things to do, for he is born a Roman 
citizen and he can always appeal to Caesar. 
Now it is time little boys were in bed." 



Ill 

IN JERUSALEM 

THE days grew to weeks and the weeks to 
months; the months added themselves and 
made years in Tarsus in the first century just 
as happens now where my young reader lives. 
Time and the multiplication table go on in 
one century exactly as in another, no matter 
what else changes. Before the father and 
mother could quite realise it, or believe it pos- 
sible, Saul, once our little boy, who looked out 
on his world and wondered, was old enough 
to go away from his home to a great school in 
Jerusalem where perhaps all his questions 
could be answered though only for a little 
while. His sister had married now and lived 
in Jerusalem and it was arranged for Saul to 
have his home with her while he was study- 
ing with the famous Rabbi Gamaliel, who 

17 



1 8 ST. PAUL THE HERO 

knew better than almost any one else the law, 
and the rules by which the daily life of a strict 
Jew should be guided so that he might be per- 
fect. 

Through the Syrian Gate in the Amanus 
ridge, Saul had gone with his father on their 
way to the holy city for the Passover and for 
a short time of sight-seeing and visit before 
the hard work of the school began. They 
came on through Antioch of Syria, the first 
great city which Saul had ever seen and one 
which some day he would know much better; 
then they journeyed on by hard and danger- 
ous roads until they saw Damascus, with its 
two beautiful rivers and its high city walls. 
Some day Saul would know this city better 
too! And the time would come when he 
would find out how high those city walls 
were! Every foot of the road from Damas- 
cus was crowded with interest and excitement 
for this fifteen-year-old boy who was seeing 
the holy land for the first time. Now he 



IN JERUSALEM 19 

thrilled in a new way as he actually saw with 
his eyes the scenes which before he had only 
pictured in imagination. When they crossed 
the Jordan, just south of the blue lake of Gen- 
nesareth, he could hardly contain himself. 
More than once he threw himself on the 
ground with his arms outspread as though he 
were trying to grasp the country and embrace 
it. 

The road up from Jericho to Jerusalem was 
so dangerous and he had heard so many tales 
of robbers there that he was too frightened to 
enjoy the journey. But when at length the 
city — the city of all the world — with its shin- 
ing temple gleaming in the sun came in sight 
he forgot all about robbers and dangers and 
his sore and tired feet, and fell on his face and 
thanked God for letting him see the Holy City 
about which he had dreamed and imagined 
ever since he was a tiny boy. There it was! 
It was no dream but a real city, with real 
streets and walls and houses, and above all the 



20 ST. PAUL THE HERO 

temple, to his mind the holiest place in all 
the world. 

The next day when he came to the temple, 
his heart beating and his throat swelling with 
emotion, he read with pride the inscription 
carved on the stones: "Only he that is a Jew 
may enter this sacred temple. If any one that 
is not a Jew enters he will be answerable for 
his death, which will ensue." Around him 
thronged a vast multitude of people who had 
come from all parts of the known world to be 
present on the Great Day of Atonement. He 
could see the choirs of singing men and he 
could hear the far-away sound of harps, and 
then he saw the long line of priests with their 
dress as Moses had described it in the books 
of the law and the high-priest with his gor- 
geous robe, and on his breast were the mys- 
terious stones which no man understood save 
he who had them. 

After the great days of the sacred week had 
passed and he had seen the wonders of the city, 



IN JERUSALEM 21 

Saul entered the cloister door and came into 
the sombre room where the learned doctor, 
Gamaliel, gathered his students at his feet to 
teach them. The boy was filled with awe as 
he got his first sight of the white-haired man 
who was to be his guide in the mysteries of the 
law and he made a deep salaam before him 
and remained bowed until the Master said: 
"Rise, my son, and be seated here." 

The quick-eyed boy noticed at once that his 
new teacher was as full of kindness as he was 
of wisdom. There was something in the face 
of the old Rabbi that gave him confidence and 
dismissed his fear. 

"Dost thou know the commandments?" 
asked the teacher. 

"I know them all," answered the youth. "I 
have said them many times to my mother in 
Tarsus." 

"Dost thou know what the law requires a 
faithful son of Abraham to do on the Sabbath 
day?" 



22 ST. PAUL THE HERO 

The youth surprised his teacher as he ran 
through the long and complicated lists of 
things that a faithful Jew might do and might 
not do on the Sabbath day. At last the teacher 
stopped the boy and gravely asked, "where 
hast thou studied?" 

"With my father and with my mother in the 
long evenings at Tarsus. My father is one of 
the wisest and one of the most strict of all the 
tribe of Benjamin and my mother is like the 
woman of whom the wise king Lemuel wrote 
in the Roll of Proverbs. They have taught 
me many things but I lack much and there- 
fore have I come to Rabban Gamaliel." 

"Canst thou recite the fifth book of Moses 
without a mistake?" 

"I can recite every word duly, for the book 
itself says 'Lest ye forget.' " 

"Thou hast done well, my son, and thou hast 
walked many steps in wisdom for one so 
young, but now thou must learn the authori- 
ties, thou must become skilful to interpret, 



IN JERUSALEM 23 

thou must know the unwritten law and all the 
traditions of the Elders and Scribes and thou 
must fill thy mind with all the gathered wis- 
dom of the great Rabbis until thou canst ex- 
plain every passage in the Rolls of the books 
which Jehovah our God has given us through 
the holy men of old. Thou must work with 
diligence, beginning early in the morning and 
continuing so long as the light lasts, and thou 
must spend years here with me until thou hast 
won the truth and until thou knowest clearly 
what brings God's righteousness to a man. 
Art thou ready to give up the years of strong 
youth; art thou willing to lose the pleasures 
of the world ; art thou able to endure the toil ; 
wilt thou go all the way to the end with me?" 
Saul stepped one step nearer, raised his fine 
face and his dark eyes full of eagerness to the 
master's face and calmly said: "Great Rab- 
ban, for that I come. I have left the things 
that are behind. I seek only one thing in this 
world — to be righteous, to know the whole 



24 ST. PAUL THE HERO 

secret of God, to be a perfect son of Abraham. 
Let it cost what it will, I follow where the 
wise Gamaliel shall take me, even to the end 
of the long road to truth." 

Then the teacher bowed his head and prayed 
that the great Jehovah of the fathers would 
bless and enlighten the youth from Tarsus who 
was to be for many months in the cloister of 
Gamaliel. 



IV 

IN RABBI GAMALIEL'S SCHOOL 

THE person who is a real hero in spirit 
and nature can be a hero at school as well as 
anywhere else. In fact those who prove to 
be heroes in later life are almost always heroes 
in their school-days. This youth who had 
come to Jerusalem from Tarsus of Cilicia did 
not have to wait for some occasion, with all 
the world looking on, before he could rise to 
heroic actions. He found a chance to be 
heroic even in the quiet uneventful cloisters 
of Gamaliel's school. All the boys and young 
men who gathered round this famous teacher 
very soon knew that a brave fellow and a real, 
born leader had joined their ranks. When a 
hard and difficult thing was to be done they 
turned naturally to him. When a question 

25 



26 ST. PAUL THE HERO 

was asked which taxed everybody's brain, they 
all looked for him to answer. 

There was no end to his zeal. Nothing 
seemed too hard for him. He had learned 
Greek as a boy in his home at Tarsus and he 
had always known the current Hebrew speech, 
but now he learned carefully the ancient He- 
brew of his fathers. He pored over the 
Rolls of Scripture and took note of each jot 
and tittle. He learned all the fine points of 
grammar which his great Rabban could teach 
him. His patience seemed never to give out 
and he would work on in his search for truth 
long after the others had rolled up in their 
strange mat-like beds and were lost in peaceful 
slumber. 

He seemed to think of ignorance as a great 
giant enemy to be fought with and to be killed, 
no matter how long and hard the fight might 
be. It was in this fight he showed his true 
heroic fibre. He was always hunting a new 
weapon to fight with, or he was sharpening an 



RABBI GAMALIEL'S SCHOOL 27 

old weapon in his possession. He would 
travel miles to find a book he wanted or to 
discover what a strange word meant or to con- 
sult some authority whose opinion he desired. 

"What do you suppose that Saul of Tarsus 
will be when he grows up?" the boys would 
ask of one another. 

"He will surely be a great Rabbi and have 
a school in Jerusalem, like our master/' one 
would say. 

"I think he will be greater even than that," 
another would say. "I think sometimes, as I 
look at his face and watch him while he 
reads, that perhaps he will be a new prophet 
and bring a new word of God to our peo- 
ple." 

"But that is not possible," a pious youth 
from a Jerusalem family would answer. 
"The words of God have already all been 
given. There will be nothing new until 
Messiah comes. I have heard my father say 
that many times." 



28 ST. PAUL THE HERO 

This coming of Messiah was one of the 
things our youth from Tarsus studied most 
carefully. The books and traditions had 
much to say about it, but it was hard to decide 
just what would happen and just how to get 
ready for this greatest event of all the world. 
With the help of Gamaliel and his books, 
young Saul came to believe that a great day 
was soon to come for Jerusalem and for all 
good Jews. A new king, like David, only 
greater and wiser and better and stronger 
would suddenly appear. He would have 
power to turn stones to bread, or to leap from 
the top of the temple to the ground without 
being hurt in the least. He would break the 
Roman army all to pieces in a minute. He 
would call hosts of angel soldiers from the sky 
at the sound of a trumpet and they would de- 
stroy or carry away all who had been bad Jews 
and had not kept the law. Then he would 
make Jerusalem a perfect city. The streets 
would all be cleansed and purified, until one 



RABBI GAMALIEL'S SCHOOL 29 

could see his face reflected in every pavement. 
The walls would be changed into precious 
stones, the gates into pearls, and every person 
left in the city would be as pure as the city it- 
self. Nobody would be sick any more, no- 
body would die, or have any sorrow. And 
best of all, all the good Jews who had ever 
lived would be brought back to life again to 
live in the perfect Jerusalem with the good 
people who were there with the great king. 
This king of their hopes and dreams was called 
"Messiah," because he would be "anointed" 
by God himself to rule forever. Saul be- 
lieved that his people were the only ones out 
of all the world who would have this king for 
their king and this perfect city, and all who 
had ever done anything against his nation 
would suffer and suffer and suffer, while the 
happy Jews were enjoying their beautiful 
Mount Zion. 

He believed, too, and he thought his books 
proved it, that he and others who were willing 



30 ST. PAUL THE HERO 

to work for it, could hurry up this great day 
and make it come sooner. This is the way 
you could do it. It couldn't come until there 
were a great many persons who were good 
enough to start the new world and the perfect 
city. The king, Messiah, would not come un- 
til he could find a large number of people all 
ready for him and as near perfect as you could 
be. Now to be perfect you must keep all the 
law and do everything that God commanded 
in the Old Testament and in the traditions of 
the Rabbis. If you broke one single com- 
mandment, it was as bad as though you broke 
them all, for if you broke one, then you had 
not kept the whole law. 

Now my reader will see, I hope, what a 
hero this young Saul was. He had decided 
to be one of the men who would be ready for 
this mighty king and he was resolved to live 
the kind of life that would help bring him 
soon. He was going to live as though the 
perfect city had come already. He would not 



RABBI GAMALIEL'S SCHOOL 31 

do one thing that would seem like disobeying 
God — even the littlest. Gamaliel had one 
student who was trying with all his might to 
be perfect, and that meant, to be a hero. 



TENT-MAKING IN TARSUS 

Like winged birds, the time flew by, just 
as it does now for school-boys and school- 
girls and Saul's years at the feet of Gamaliel 
were over. He had changed very much 
while he had been in Jerusalem. Soft hair 
was growing on his face now. His forehead 
was broader and fuller, but his shoulders were 
bowed over and he walked with a stoop be- 
cause he had bent over his books so long and 
had taken very little exercise in these years 
of eager study. His hands were soft as a 
woman's and he seemed thin and worn with 
the strain of his thoughts. But the same fire 
was in his dark eyes and the same fine beauti- 
ful light shone on his face. He wondered as 
he came up the river Cydnus from Messina to 
Tarsus (for he returned by sea), whether his 

32 



TENT-MAKING IN TARSUS 33 

mother would know him. The news had 
spread that the boat was coming and the whole 
family in the home at Tarsus were on the 
watch for the returning scholar. He did not 
have much time to wonder whether his mother 
would know him, for he soon felt her arms 
around his neck and he found himself once 
more in the dear home with everybody look- 
ing him over and asking him questions until he 
needed three or four tongues to answer them 
all. His mother did not like the stoop in his 
shoulders but everything else pleased her. 
The father was too proud of his splendid son 
and too much moved with joy to say much, 
though he had already given a brief prayer of 
thanksgiving to Jehovah for the safe return, 
and for the wonderful gift of such a man-child 
as this. Meantime a servant was killing the 
fattest of all the full-grown kids for the feast 
of joy which all the household joined in pre- 
paring, and the whole day was given up to re- 
joicing. 



34 ST. PAUL THE HERO 

It was a proud moment for the family the 
next Sabbath when young Saul was given the 
Roll of Scripture at the Synagogue and was 
asked to read the lesson and explain it. There 
he stood with all the Jewish families of Tarsus 
looking on and listening while he told them 
things they had never heard before. When 
the lesson was finished many a man turned to 
Saul's father and said: "God has given you 
a remarkable son. He will be an honour to 
our race and to our city." 

Now the time had come when Saul's trade 
must be decided upon, for all young men who 
were to be Rabbis were expected to learn a 
trade, so that they could support themselves. 
Early and late in the home the question was 
discussed: What was the best trade for a 
slight, thin, soft-handed youth who was a great 
scholar and who was soon to be a famous 
teacher? The mother wanted him to learn a 
trade that would straighten his shoulders and 
make him strong and robust. The father 



TENT-MAKING IN TARSUS 35 

thought he ought to select some occupation 
that would be refined and dignified and very 
honourable. After long and careful consider- 
ation, it was finally settled that Saul should 
learn the trade of weaving the goats' hair 
to make heavy tent-cloth and to cut the cloth 
into tent patterns and to sew the long tent 
seams. 

It was strange work for the delicate scholar 
— so different from poring over books and 
settling points of the law. At first the soft 
hands blistered and the muscles were very 
tired with the work of the stiff hand-loom. 
But little by little the hands grew harder and 
the arms learned the trick of the motions and 
the work became natural and easy. Saul went 
at this work the way he did everything else. 
"It is," he would say, "a part of my life. I 
cannot succeed unless I can support myself 
and so I must make tents a little better than 
anybody else can do it. Some good stiff work 
now and the habit of doing every part of it 



36 ST. PAUL THE HERO 

right will make the whole thing easy for me 
later." 

He went to the best maker of tents in the 
city and worked with him, for he knew the 
worth of a good teacher. But this teacher 
was so different from his old master in the 
school at Jerusalem! Like Gamaliel, this 
man also knew every fine point in his field of 
work. He had the secret of selecting the 
finest goats' hair and he knew the best weaves 
for making water-tight cloth and he drew the 
best patterns for both large tents and for small 
ones, and he had new ways of sewing seams 
that would neither rip in the wind nor leak in 
the hardest rains. The only trouble with him 
was that he was a Gentile and not a man of 
Saul's race. But he, too, was a scholar. He 
had studied in the great University of Tarsus 
and he knew many books which Saul had 
never read or even heard about. While they 
worked at the tent-cloth the master workman 
talked much to Saul of what he had learned in 



TENT-MAKING IN TARSUS 37 

the University under his Stoic teachers, for 
Tarsus was one of the greatest centres of Stoic 
wisdom in all the world. 

"Do you know," he would say, as they sat 
sewing the long seams, "all my books say that 
God is a great Spirit who fills all the universe, 
just the way the soul dwells in and fills the 
body. This Spirit is in the ocean and in the 
river, in the mountains and in the trees, in the 
air and in the cloud, in the stars and in the sun 
and above all it is in the mind of man. It 
makes everything full of purpose, and intelli- 
gent. The bee and the spider are wise be- 
cause this Spirit dwells in them and teaches 
them. One of our own poets who lived here 
in Tarsus, in a great hymn to the Allwise One, 
says that we men of earth are children of God 
because our spirits have come from his Spirit, 
and this Spirit lives and moves in us, if we are 
good and wise. The human soul is like a 
little inlet into which the great sea flows. 
Bad and wicked men have become bad and 



38 ST. PAUL THE HERO 

wicked because they shut themselves off from 
the inflowing tides of that great divine Spirit. 
Those who have most of this divine Spirit in 
their souls do not fuss or worry. They are 
not disturbed over what happens to them. 
They say that the only thing that matters is 
to be master of your own spirit and not 
to be conquered by anything in the world. If 
I should lose all my goats and all my tent- 
cloth, and if all my looms should burn up, I 
could still be a brave man and start again 
just as though nothing had happened, but if I 
lost my spirit and began to whine and lament, 
nobody could cure me of that. Then I should 
be beaten and defeated. We Stoics try to be 
citizens, not only of our own city but of the 
whole world. We love our own people. 
We are proud of our own race, but we want 
more than that. We take an interest in all 
men everywhere. We want all cities to be 
good cities. We want all people everywhere 
to know God and love him, and we want to 



TENT-MAKING IN TARSUS 39 

make one great family on the earth, all living 
in harmony under the great Spirit." 

Saul stopped sewing and sat perfectly still. 
It was different from anything he had heard 
in Jerusalem. It could not be true or Gama- 
liel would have known it and yet it was so 
wonderful and beautiful. He would think 
about it more, and he would read some of the 
books of the Stoics who said that we are the 
offspring of Godl 



VI 

THE GREAT TEACHER OF GALILEE 

While the young scholar was working at 
his new trade of weaving tent-cloth and mak- 
ing tents in the busy, thriving town of Tarsus, 
wonderful things were occurring beyond the 
Amanus Mountains, in the land of Palestine. 
Every traveller who came from Galilee and 
every pilgrim who passed through Capernaum 
brought tidings of a strange and extraordinary 
Teacher, totally unlike the great Rabbis and 
Scribes. 

In far-away Tarsus not much was reported 
at first of what this Teacher said. The travel- 
lers told, first of all, of the wonderful things 
He did. 

One man had heard, as he came through 
Galilee, of a little girl who had been very ill. 

40 



THE GREAT TEACHER 41 

Nobody could help her. At last in despair 
the father went out to search for this Teacher, 
to see if He could do anything to save his 
daughter. He found Him by the lakeside 
preaching to a great multitude of people, and 
he begged Him to come at once, to make his 
daughter whole. Many strange and unusual 
things happened on the way and, at last, when 
they arrived, the little girl seemed beyond 
help, for she lay all still and did not breathe. 
But this remarkable Person took her by the 
hand and spoke some words in His own He- 
brew language and the girl rose up and 
walked and was instantly well, and everybody 
wondered. 

Many other such things they told of this 
Teacher. He made all kinds of sick people 
well. He even made totally blind persons 
see. All the towns around the Lake of Gen- 
nesareth were full of excitement over His 
cures and His other miraculous doings, and 
in all the country throughout Galilee people 



42 ST. PAUL THE HERO 

everywhere talked about Him and went long 
journeys to see Him, and to bring sick persons 
to Him. 

Then, slowly, reports began to come of His 
words and His teachings. They said He 
seemed to have found out something new 
and strange about God. He was not afraid 
of God as other people were. He loved 
Him and talked about Him as though He 
knew Him. He kept calling God His 
Father, and He said God wanted to be Father 
to all persons, because He was full of love and 
tenderness for everybody in the world. He 
kept telling, in all His talks with the people 
who came to hear Him, about a new kingdom 
which He was trying to set up in the world. 
It was very hard to tell from the vague re- 
ports, which the travellers brought, what this 
kingdom was to be. It did not seem like the 
"new Jersualem," that Saul had learned about 
in Gamaliel's school. It seemed even greater 
than that, for it seemed like a new kind of 



THE GREAT TEACHER 43 

world for everybody. Everybody, who loved 
God and learned how to live a life of love 
and kindness to all people everywhere, could 
be in it, and it would grow and spread like 
seeds of grain in the field. 

Then, later, when the people who had gone 
up from Tarsus to the Passover, came back 
from Jerusalem, they brought news of a ter- 
rible thing that had happened there during 
the Passover week. This Teacher, it would 
seem, had come up to keep the Passover and 
the common people had discovered Him and 
they thought at first that He must be the long- 
expected Messiah and they had made a pro- 
cession for Him and had tried to proclaim 
Him their king. But this and other things 
frightened the rulers in Jerusalem and they 
sent by night and seized Him and got Pilate, 
the governor of Palestine, to condemn Him 
and crucify Him. Then all the people turned 
against Him and thronged out of the city in 
great multitudes to see Him nailed on the 



44 ST. PAUL THE HERO 

cross and to see Him die hanging in the air. 
And the pilgrim who brought the reports 
said He was not like any other victim that 
was ever crucified. Instead of shouting and 
wailing and cursing, He had been calm and 
unmoved. Every time He spoke, His words 
were full of love. Once He spoke in a quiet, 
gentle way to a thief who was crucified on a 
cross near Him. And once, and this was the 
strangest thing they reported, He looked up 
toward the sky and then out toward the great 
multitude of shouting people and said in a 
gentle voice which reached out over all the 
throng, "Father, forgive these people. They 
do not know what they are doing." 

A few who came back later had another 
story which they told but they couldn't make 
anybody at Tarsus believe it. They said that 
some of the followers and friends of this won- 
derful Teacher from Galilee declared that 
they had seen Him alive after He was cruci- 
fied. Some of these followers said they had 



THE GREAT TEACHER 45 

heard Him speak just the way He used to do 
before He was crucified, and they claimed 
that He told them when they were on the way 
going up to Jerusalem that He would be cruci- 
fied, but that He would come back to life 
again. 

When Saul heard these strange reports he 
was at first very much moved by them. He 
could not sleep at night because he thought 
so much over the stories he heard from the 
travellers. But little by little he made up his 
mind that they were just idle 'tales such as 
travellers love to tell to those who stay at 
home. He said to himself: "It isn't likely 
that there really was any such person in Gali- 
lee as this one they tell about. I should have 
heard about him while I was in Jerusalem, 
for he could not have got his power suddenly 
and if he was beginning to do these wonderful 
things then, it would have been known in the 
city. But nobody had heard of him at all. 
If he got his power suddenly, without any 



46 ST. PAUL THE HERO 

preparation and without studying in any of 
the schools, it is probable that some evil spirit, 
like Beelzebub, has helped him and revealed 
secrets to him. It is almost certain that he 
was not sent by God, for the books of the law 
do not tell about any such Teacher who would 
come and die for his truth, and the words they 
bring about his teaching are not at all like 
what we know of God from our sacred books. 
No, either there was no such person, or, if 
there was, he was deluded and misguided." 

But when Saul was talking one beautiful 
evening with his mother, who seemed now 
much older than when, she talked about the 
commandments with her little boy, suddenly 
Saul said: "Wouldn't it be strange, Mother, 
if what that Galilean Teacher, of whom the 
travellers talk, said about God were really 
true — I mean, that God is a Father and loves 
men, even men who do wrong and sin. My 
tent-maker thinks that God is a great Spirit 
who dwells in everything and is everywhere. 



THE GREAT TEACHER 47 

But this is more wonderful, that God is full of 
love and tenderness for all kinds of people in 
the world. It cannot, however, be true, for 
the Rabbis would have known it if it had been 
so!" 

And the mother answered: "Ah, yes, no 
doubt the wise Rabbis would know. But is 
there not something just a little like that in 
some of the beautiful psalms which we sing 
in the Synagogue — 'Like as a Father'?" 

"But, Mother, this man, they say, died on a 
cross, and no good man, whom God approved, 
could die that way, for our law says that all 
who are hanged on trees are cursed and disap- 
proved of by God, so that we need not think 
any more about him." But try as he would, 
Saul could not get these things out of his 
mind. 



VII 

IN JERUSALEM AGAIN 

All through the quiet period in Tarsus 
while Saul was learning his trade and living 
with his father and mother in the dear old 
home where he had been a boy, he was won- 
dering what his life was going to be. He al- 
ways felt, even as a little boy, that a great life- 
work lay before him. It was too sacred and 
solemn to talk about and he did not tell even 
his mother, but all the time, down deep in his 
soul, he dimly knew that he was destined to 
have an unusual life and to do something 
signal and wonderful. When he lay ill and 
everybody thought he would die, he felt very 
sure that he was not going to die yet, for the 
great work of his life was still to be done! 
He had often been in great danger, on his 

48 



IN JERUSALEM AGAIN 49 

journey up to Jerusalem and on the ship com- 
ing back to Tarsus, and many times before he 
left home, but he always knew that somehow 
he would come through the danger and be 
spared. 

He was eager now to find his life-work and 
to start in on his great career. He was, there- 
fore, very happy when a traveller of his own 
race, coming from the holy land, brought 
him a letter from the authorities in Jerusalem 
saying that they had work for him to do in 
that city. They wanted a young and learned 
Rabbi to teach the Jews living in Jerusalem 
who spoke Greek and who were called "Hel- 
lenists." There were, my readers must know, 
two kinds of Jews. There were the Jews, 
first, who lived all the time in Palestine. 
They could keep the law more perfectly and 
more completely than other people could. 
They thought of themselves as the truly real 
Jews and as the inner circle of God's own peo- 
ple. Then, secondly, there were the Jews 



50 ST. PAUL THE HERO 

who lived and did business in the great cities 
of the Roman Empire — cities like Rome and 
Alexandria, and Ephesus and Antioch and 
Philippi and Corinth and Tarsus. They 
could not keep themselves as pure or as per- 
fect as the Palestine Jews could, for they had 
to meet and mingle with Gentiles who were 
not pure according to the law and who defiled 
those that came in contact with them. Then, 
too, these out-dwellers could not get to the 
temple very often to make sacrifices and to 
keep the requirements of the law. They used 
the language which the worldly people around 
them used. That was generally Greek. 
They had their Scriptures translated into 
Greek and many of them did not know and 
could not read Hebrew at all. But these Hel- 
lenists, or Greek-speaking Jews, went up to 
Jerusalem as often as they could and when it 
was possible for them to do so, they would 
stay in Jerusalem for long periods in order to 
be near the temple. They had a synagogue of 



IN JERUSALEM AGAIN 51 

their own in Jerusalem where they went for 
their lessons and for their Sabbath services 
and where their little children were taught 
while the parents were staying in Jerusalem. 
It was to this Synagogue that Saul, the young 
Rabbi, was to go, to teach the Jews who came 
from all the far-away countries to sojourn in 
Jerusalem. 

It was very different for him, going to 
Jerusalem now from what it had been for the 
fifteen-year-old boy the first time he went. 
Now he was going, not for a few years, but for 
life. Now he was setting his hand to carry 
out the great dreams and hopes of his life. 
Now he was leaving his mother, perhaps for 
the last time. His father would still continue 
to go to the Passover and Saul would perhaps 
see him there, but his mother would never 
leave home again and it would surely be many 
years before he would come back through the 
mountain-gate, or up the Cydnus River, to his 
birth-place. Nobody knows just what goes 



52 ST. PAUL THE HERO 

on in a young man's heart when he takes this 
great venture and pushes out from the home 
he loves to begin his real life in the strange 
and difficult world, where some succeed and 
where some fail, where some keep pure and 
good, and where some go wrong. 

Many things seemed to have changed in 
Jerusalem during the short period since Saul 
had left it. Everybody was talking of the 
strange events that had taken place recently. 
A new people had appeared in the city. They 
called themselves "the people of the way," 
or "those of the way," or "those of Jesus' way." 
Others called them "Galileans," or "Naza- 
renes." They were men and women who be- 
lieved that Jesus the great Teacher of Galilee 
was the Messiah and they declared that He 
was still alive and would soon return to be 
king and lord. They were growing fast in 
numbers and spreading in every part of the 
city. They met every day from house to 
house and ate their evening meal together in 



IN JERUSALEM AGAIN 53 

great joy and fellowship. They took care of 
all their poor people and their sick and they 
shared everything they had with one another 
as though they were all brothers and belonged 
to one great family. 

The rulers in Jerusalem, however, did not 
like to see them spreading through the city. 
They watched them carefully and arrested the 
leaders when they found them doing anything 
to attract attention or trying to get others to 
join them. They did not like to be told that 
the person they had Pilate crucify was the 
Messiah, or that He was raised from the dead 
and was now alive. It was easy to see that 
there was sure to be trouble in Jerusalem, if 
these people went on increasing and if they 
would not keep quiet. 

There were some of "those of the way" in 
the Synagogue where Saul was to be Rabbi. 
They were always ready to talk about their 
wonderful Teacher, who had been crucified 
and they were eager to prove that He was the 



54 ST. PAUL THE HERO 

real Messiah that had been so long expected. 
Saul thought he could very soon teach them 
sense and show them how foolish they were. 
He would quickly prove to them that Jesus 
could not be the Messiah, for the Messiah 
would surely never be crucified! He would 
come in splendour and glory, and if the 
Romans tried to crucify Him He would call 
down from heaven an army of angels and de- 
stroy all His enemies in a moment! And He 
would break the Roman Empire all to pieces, 
as one breaks an old jar of pottery. It would 
be only a few days, Saul felt sure, when he 
would be able to stop all this talk about a 
crucified Messiah. He would argue them 
down and make them ashamed to say such 
things any more. But Saul did not know how 
hard his task really was. He was to discover 
that some things in this world cannot be 
hushed up, or argued down! 



VIII 

THE MAN WITH A SHINING FACE 

THERE was one man in this Synagogue of 
the Hellenists more remarkable than any of 
the other people who belonged to it. His 
name was Stephen. I do not know what city 
he came from. But he was one of the "out- 
dwellers," and he had become a follower of 
Jesus, "one of the way" — "a Nazarene." He 
was different from any of the other followers 
of Jesus. He saw farther than the rest did. 
He seems to have been the first of "those of 
the way" to realise that Jesus did not come to 
be the Messiah of the Jews alone and to purify 
their customs. Stephen thought He came to 
bring life and light and joy to all the world. 
The other followers of Jesus in this early 
period were loyal, devoted Jews. They went 
every day to the temple and they kept the law 

55 



56 ST. PAUL THE HERO 

as the other Jews did. They supposed that 
Jesus was to be the king in Jerusalem and that 
only Jews were to be His people. Those 
who were not Jews could have no share in the 
good news which He proclaimed. 

Stephen was so pure and good and wise that 
he got a new idea of what the coming of Jesus 
meant. The truth was far bigger than the 
others dreamed, and he began to see it, and to 
tell about it. If God is Father, as Jesus kept 
saying He was, then He must love all men as 
well as Jews, and if God is Life and Spirit, 
then He can come into men's lives everywhere 
without any temple and without priests and 
sacrifices. Stephen began to wonder, as he 
thought about all that Jesus had said and 
taught and done, whether His message was 
not far greater and more wonderful even than 
the law of Moses, whether some day it would 
not take the place of the old system of laws 
and customs and sacrifices and whether even 
the temple itself might no longer be needed to 



A SHINING FACE 57 

worship God in, for men might worship Him 
anywhere where they happened to be. 

Stephen was so bold and fearless, and he 
was so full of his great idea, that he tried to 
tell the people in Saul's Synagogue about it. 
They all turned upon him and called him a 
dangerous man. They tried to make him see 
that he was not true to the religion of his 
fathers, that he was teaching new ideas, that 
he was turning people away from the old cus- 
toms, and that if the people followed his 
teaching they would overthrow the whole 
wonderful system of Moses, and so make it 
impossible for the Messiah to come, for 
whom all good Jews were waiting and long- 
ing. 

Saul, with all his learning and his knowl- 
edge, thought he could easily answer Stephen 
and prove that he was entirely wrong. But 
every time he tried, Stephen got the best 
of him. Saul would quote texts from the 
Old Testament and Stephen would rise up 



58 ST. PAUL THE HERO 

and show that these texts meant something 
quite different from what Saul had always 
thought they meant. He was so powerful and 
his life was so noble that all the people who 
listened felt that even if he was wrong in his 
ideas he was great in his soul, and they began 
to wonder if he perhaps might be right and 
Saul wrong. Day after day the discussion 
went on without any end to it. At last Saul 
decided that this would never do. Some way 
must be found to stop this dangerous man who 
was leading the members of his Synagogue 
astray. He told the rulers in Jerusalem that 
he had discovered a traitor who must be ar- 
rested. "He talks against Moses," he said. 
"He does not love our holy land, or our holy 
law, or our holy temple, the way all true Jews 
should." Then the Council in Jerusalem had 
Stephen arrested and brought before them 
for trial, and witnesses came in and told all 
the things they could think of to make the 
Council condemn him. 



A SHINING FACE 59 

While they were talking against him they 
all saw a light shine on his face, and he looked 
more like an angel than like an ordinary man, 
and everybody wondered what he would say 
in answer to the charges that were made 
against him. And Saul must have been eager 
to see what was going to happen to this man 
with the shining face, whom nobody could 
defeat in an argument. Then quietly Stephen 
began to speak for himself. He did not try 
to prove that the things which had been said 
against him were false. He paid no attention 
to his own case. He told the Council that all 
through the history of their Hebrew race the 
people had always failed to see new light when 
God brought it to them; they had always 
missed the path when God was trying to lead 
them into a new way, and they had always 
misunderstood when God was trying to teach 
them new ideas. They cried out against 
Moses, he told them, in the wilderness. They 
worshipped a golden calf just at the time 



60 ST. PAUL THE HERO 

when he was giving them the law of God, and 
when the prophets came to teach them more 
about God, they served Moloch and other 
false gods instead of Him. Their great, wise 
king Solomon had told them, when he built 
the temple, that no temple, however wonder- 
ful, could contain the great God who fills the 
universe, but the people did not understand 
his words and seemed to think that God lived 
only in their temple. "You have always 
failed to see the truth," Stephen cried. "You 
have always persecuted prophets when God 
has sent them to you. You have killed those 
who told about the coming of Jesus. And 
now you, yourselves, have betrayed and killed 
Him when He did come. You talk about the 
law and you say that God gave it through 
angels. But you do not understand it and 
you do not really keep it." 

That was more than they could stand. 
They forgot that they were judges and were 
having an orderly trial. They all rushed at 



A SHINING FACE 61 

Stephen. They showed their teeth at him and 
howled him down. But he was as calm and 
steady as though everything were peaceful. 
In the midst of the uproar, they suddenly 
heard him say: "I see Jesus! There He is, 
up there in the open sky, at the right of God 
in His glory." Then they all stopped their 
ears, so that they might not hear what he said, 
and they rushed at him and dragged him out 
of the city and stoned him. As the people 
who stoned him pulled off their garments so 
that they could throw the stones better, they 
gave their garments to Saul to hold. He did 
not join in throwing the stones, but he ap- 
proved of what the others were doing and he 
ran along with them and carried the garments. 
And he could see Stephen's wonderful face 
which was shining more than ever now! He 
did not say one hard word against those who 
were killing him. But just at the end, Saul 
heard him say: "Lord Jesus, do not blame 
these people for what they are doing" — "Wilt 



62 ST. PAUL THE HERO 

thou now receive my spirit to Thyself." And 
then, with the stones raining round him, the 
brave, good Stephen died — with the light still 
on his face. 

Saul never forgot that face. He thought 
Stephen was wrong and he believed that he 
must be stopped or he would bring harm to 
God's people. But he had never seen any- 
body die like that before! And the more he 
meditated and thought about it, the more he 
wondered at what Stephen had said, and still 
more over his dying words and his happy, 
shining face! 



IX 

ON THE ROAD TO DAMASCUS 

THIS young man who now unexpectedly 
found himself a persecutor was by nature kind 
and tender-hearted. He had never wilfully 
hurt any creature or given pain to anybody. 
He had come up to Jerusalem for his life- 
career with the highest hopes and the noblest 
aspirations. His whole being was aflame 
with a passion for his nation. Ever since he 
was old enough to know the story of his own 
people he had dreamed of the splendid future 
that was soon to dawn. All that the greatest 
prophets had seen in distant vision, he believed 
he should one day see with his own eyes. He 
had tried, with almost superhuman effort, 
to make his own life perfect so that he might 
be one of the little inner circle of perfect 

63 



64 ST. PAUL THE HERO 

Jews, who would help to bring the Messiah 
and the perfect age and who would be ready 
for this glorious king when he should come. 

Now he suddenly found, in his own Syna- 
gogue even, people who said that the Messiah 
had come already, that the rulers and Phari- 
sees who were expecting Him and preparing 
for Him had not recognised Him when He 
did come and had crucified Him. This 
seemed to Saul an awful idea — an unbeliev- 
able tale. He was sure the Messiah could not 
be crucified. But he was afraid that these 
enthusiastic and misguided followers of Jesus 
would ruin his hopes. Everything that could 
be done must be done at once to stop their 
teaching and to destroy their influence. He 
saw only one way to guard the hope of Israel 
and that was to crush this movement abso- 
lutely and to shut up or kill every person 
who went about claiming that Jesus was the 
Messiah. It was a very disagreeable task, 
but it must be done for the good of the nation 



THE ROAD TO DAMASCUS 65 

and, however hard and distasteful it might 
be, Saul was resolved to carry it through and 
to leave nobody who would ever again dare 
to say that Jesus, the crucified, was the long- 
expected king. 

Into the peaceful homes of the "Nazarenes" 
he went and seized both men and women and 
carried them away to prison. He had to sepa- 
rate husbands from their wives. He had to 
take mothers away from their tender little 
babies. He had to break up meetings and 
drag away those who were preaching the new 
gospel to their eager listeners. But every- 
where he went he found that these people had 
something which he did not have. In the 
midst of their sufferings and their trials they 
were calm and peaceful and happy and trium- 
phant and radiant. When they were perse- 
cuted their faces shone with a light that 
seemed almost heavenly. They prayed for 
those who injured them and were not dis- 
turbed by any troubles. They kept saying 



66 ST. PAUL THE HERO 

most remarkable words about Jesus and their 
faith in Him, and they all seemed to believe 
that He was still alive and that they would all 
soon be with Him. 

Saul had been trying all his life to be per- 
fect, to be fully righteous. He had worked 
with all his might to keep all the law and all 
the commandments. But he knew deep down 
in his soul that he had failed to reach his aim. 
He could not do it. He found something in 
himself which he could not govern. If he 
didn't break one commandment, he broke an- 
other. If he was strong at one point he 
was sure to be weak at another. That com- 
mandment which his mother had told him 
was the hardest to keep — "thou shalt not covet 
or desire" — was always bothering him. Even 
when he did not actually do wrong things, he 
found himself wanting to do them, and that he 
knew was wrong. It all filled him with dis- 
couragement, and sometimes with despair. 

But these people whom he was persecuting 



THE ROAD TO DAMASCUS 67 

and dragging away to prisons seemed to be 
good almost without trying. They had found 
a new power somewhere that seemed to help 
them. It made him wonder whether they 
were perhaps right and he possibly was 
wrong. He hated what he was doing. How 
gladly he would stop it, if only he could be 
sure that God did not want him to persecute 
these strange followers of Jesus. But until 
God should make it perfectly plain to him, he 
must go on with his hard duty. 

He had heard of some of these "J esus "P eo_ 
pie" in the city of Damascus. He would go 
to that city and stop them before they had 
time to spread. He got documents from the 
rulers in Jerusalem giving him power to ride 
to Damascus and to seize these people and to 
treat them as he had treated those in Jerusa- 
lem. With his band of helpers he started of! 
on his journey, looking bold and fearless in his 
face, but feeling in his soul that it was the 
most disagreeable journey he had ever set out 



68 ST. PAUL THE HERO 

upon, and wishing all the time that he could 
ride straight on through Damascus and the 
Syrian gate in the mountains to Tarsus, and 
give up the whole sorry work of dragging 
mothers away from their children. As he 
rode he thought and wondered. 

The road took him through Capernaum and 
around the magnificent lake where Jesus had 
done much of His work, where He had 
preached His divine messages and where He 
healed multitudes of people. Saul could 
hardly stay at any inn in that country without 
hearing some wonderful story of the Galilean 
Teacher. He might easily see the father of 
the little girl who had been raised from her 
bed by this Teacher. He might talk with a 
man whose eyes had been opened, or with a 
person who had been delivered from leprosy 
or insanity, which the people in that day called 
being "possessed with devils." He might 
hear men tell how they themselves had heard 
this wonderful Galilean talk about God His 



THE ROAD TO DAMASCUS 69 

Father and about the kingdom of life and 
love. And he might hear strange stories of 
what had happened after the crucifixion — how 
fishermen who had lived by that lake all their 
lives had seen Jesus in glorified form, after 
He had been dead and buried. 

Saul would ride on from Galilee with new 
thoughts surging in his mind. The simple 
faith of those who saw with their own eyes 
and heard with their own ears would stir him 
with fresh meditation as he rode over the 
stretch of country between Gennesareth and 
Damascus. 

One thing had always made it impossible 
for him to believe that Jesus was divine, that 
He was sent by God or that He was the long- 
looked for Messiah: He had suffered and 
died on the cross. Saul felt sure that, if God 
had sent Him and He had been divine, He 
would not have had to suffer, but He would 
have come in glory and power. But as he 
rode along in silence and in deep thought, he 



70 ST. PAUL THE HERO 

remembered that he had heard these followers 
of Jesus say in their meetings that the Old 
Testament was full of prophecies which said 
that Christ must suffer. He began to think 
more carefully about these passages — es- 
pecially the one in the fifty-third chapter of 
Isaiah: "He was despised and rejected of 
men; a man of sorrow and acquainted with 
grief." "Surely he has borne our griefs and 
carried our sorrows." "He was wounded for 
our transgressions, he was bruised for our 
iniquities." "As a lamb that is led to the 
slaughter and as a sheep that before her 
shearers is dumb; yea he opened not his 
mouth." "For the transgression of my peo- 
ple was he smitten." "He poured out his soul 
unto death and was counted with the trans- 
gressors, yet he bore the sins of many." 

This might mean that God's great servant 
would not be glorious and full of power when 
He came but a sufferer. It might be that He 
would come and suffer for the sins of others, 



THE ROAD TO DAMASCUS 71 

and that He would do for men what they 
could not do for themselves. He might be 
the perfect one and He might through His 
suffering and death bring them a new power 
to live by. If he was only sure that God had 
raised Him from the dead and had brought 
Him triumphantly through His sufferings and 
His crucifixion, then he could believe that 
this Galilean was the Saviour and the divine 
Deliverer for whom they had been waiting. 

Stephen had cried out in his dying mo- 
ments, "I see Jesus there, at the right hand of 
God." Saul had heard how others claimed 
that they had seen Him alive and glorified. 
He would be likely to say to himself as he 
rode along: "If / could only see Him as 
these others say they have done, I would be- 
lieve as they do. I would stop this miserable 
work I am doing and I would follow Him 
forever and I would make everybody believe 
in Him." 

Then in the stillness there suddenly broke 



72 ST. PAUL THE HERO 

in upon this young man a light which seemed 
brighter than the mid-day sun in the sky and 
he saw Jesus and heard Him speak and call 
him and his whole life was forever changed 
by this wonderful thing that happened on the 
road to Damascus. 



X 

IN ARABIA 

THOUGH dazed and blinded by the light, 
which seemed to come from another world 
beyond this world, Saul nevertheless felt per- 
fectly sure that he saw Jesus glorified. 
Through all the rest of his life, he always 
said that he had seen Christ — he had seen Him 
as Stephen saw Him. He had seen Him as 
Peter and James and John saw Him and he 
never had any doubt any more that He was 
alive and victorious over death. He had 
heard Him speak, too, in that wonderful meet- 
ing outside the gate of the city. He had 
heard Him say: "I am Jesus whom, thou 
persecutes:. " "Why persecutest thou me?" 

All the rest of the way into Damascus, he 
walked in darkness. His outer eyes were still 

73 



74 ST. PAUL THE HERO 

blind from the light, but in the city his sight 
came back again and he could see once more. 
He knew that a mighty change had come 
within himself, but he did not know at once 
all that it meant. He wanted to go far away 
from all the old scenes of his life, far away 
from everybody he knew, far away from the 
noisy, busy world, and think out what had 
happened. Even before talking with Peter 
and the other disciples of Jesus, he wished to 
meditate alone and find his bearing in the new 
experience which had so suddenly come to 
him. 

The greatest leaders of Saul's race had 
found out the meaning of life, alone with God, 
in the wilderness, or in the mountains, or on 
the edge of the desert. Moses had come face 
to face with God on Mount Sinai. Elijah 
had heard the still small voice speaking to 
him, far away from the rush and din of the 
world. John the Baptist got his preparation 
for his mission in the solitary wilderness un- 



IN ARABIA 75 

disturbed by people. Jesus had discovered in 
the desert how to come forth victorious over 
temptation and here he had realised that His 
kingdom was not to rest on force and worldly 
power. So, too, Saul now felt that he must 
go away from the city and live for a time in 
the heart of nature and open his soul to God. 

He decided to go to Arabia for his period 
of quiet and of meditation. Perhaps he went, 
as Moses had gone, to Sinai, or to some other 
region of this strange, mysterious land of 
wilderness, mountains and deserts. He has 
not told us a word about his life in Arabia 
and none of his friends has given us any re- 
ports of these months of solitude and medita- 
tion. To-day, if any man wished to prepare 
for a great career of ministry or missionary 
service, he would go to some college or uni- 
versity or seminary or training school and 
learn how to do the work which lay before 
him, and he would train his body with games 
of skill and athletic courses, so as to be at his 



76 ST. PAUL THE HERO 

very best in mind and heart and body. Saul 
had nothing of this sort open to him. He had 
finished his years of study but they only pre- 
pared him to be a Jewish Rabbi, a teacher of 
the law. Now he wanted to learn how to tell 
the world the full message, the good news, 
which Jesus had brought to men. There was 
no school where this was taught. There were 
no Christian colleges or universities or semi- 
naries yet. There were only a few followers 
of Jesus. Most of them lived in Jerusalem, 
and they were ignorant people — fishermen, 
and tax-collectors — who had had no chance 
to study. The best thing Saul could do was, 
therefore, to go away alone and read and think 
and let God teach him. 

At first he supposed that the good news 
which Jesus had brought was for his own 
people alone but as he meditated and studied 
and listened he began to see that God's love 
reached everybody and that the great Galilean 
had come to bring new life to all people in the 



IN ARABIA 77 

world. It was many years perhaps before 
Saul fully realised all that this meant, but I 
think he began to see it in Arabia. Another 
thing kept coming before him all the time. 
He was eager to find out why Jesus had died 
on the cross, why He had suffered, and what 
it all meant. That also took years of thought 
before he understood it, but here in the quiet of 
the mountains he began to see. How we wish 
he had written some letters from Arabia and 
told what he was doing and thinking! If he 
had only written to his mother once a week, or 
even once a month, and she had preserved the 
letters, how eagerly we would read them now! 
But there is not a word about it all. We only 
know that in the stillness his spirit was gath- 
ering power and his soul was growing richer. 

At last he felt that he was "ready." This 
is one of his great words — "I am now ready." 
The time of quiet was over and the busy life 
must begin. He felt sure he could make 
everybody believe in his Christ. It was all so 



78 ST. PAUL THE HERO 

plain and wonderful that people would be 
bound to listen as he told them what he had 
seen and known and felt! He decided to go 
back to Damascus and begin there — near the 
place where he had first seen Jesus and where 
the great change in his life had come. 

But it was not as easy as he expected. In 
the first place he soon discovered that he 
needed to know more about the life of Jesus. 
He had not talked with anybody yet who had 
been with Him in Galilee and in Jerusalem. 
He must learn more about Him before he 
could move people with his words. And then 
he found that the people did not want to hear 
about Jesus. The Jews in Damascus all 
thought Saul was a traitor. He had started 
for their city to persecute the followers of 
Jesus and now he was one of the followers 
himself, trying to make them believe. They 
decided to seize him and do to him what he 
used to do to the followers of Jesus. They 
would soon put him where he would not talk 



IN ARABIA 79 

any more about this Galilean Teacher. They 
watched all the gates of the city so that Saul 
could not get away and they had men hunting 
for him through the streets. But some of 
Saul's friends put him in a great basket and 
in the dark of the night, by a long rope, they 
let him down the side of the wall and he got 
far away from the dangerous city before the 
morning sun came up. 

He must have felt a strange thrill as he 
passed by the place where he saw the great 
light and heard the voice saying: "Saul, why 
persecutest thou me?" But he hurried on 
over the road through Galilee and came to 
Jerusalem, which he had left three years be- 
fore. He had started out a persecutor. He 
came back a follower of Jesus. He had 
crossed the "great divide." 



xr 

FIFTEEN WONDERFUL DAYS 

We have invented a little instrument called 
a "dictaphone." If one of these instruments 
is hidden away in a room, a person at the other 
end of the dictaphone can overhear all the 
conversation that goes on in the room where it 
is concealed, and the entire conversation can 
be written down and kept. How we wish 
now that there had been a dictaphone in the 
room in which Saul staid with St. Peter for 
fifteen days in Jerusalem. Part of the time 
James, the brother of Jesus, was there, too, 
with them. But the rest of the time they 
were alone — talking, talking, talking. St. 
Peter was telling Saul the things he wanted 
to know about the life of Jesus and about His 
death and resurrection. What a wonderful 

80 



FIFTEEN WONDERFUL DAYS 81 

story it would be, if we could only get it all 
back, word for word! There was that keen 
and eager face of the man still young, with all 
his life-work before him, and opposite the 
older man whose whole life had been boating 
and fishing until one with authority had said 
to him, "Follow me." The older man knew 
more about this Galilean life than anybody 
else knew, unless it were that other fisherman, 
named John, and he could answer all the 
questions the young man asked so long as they 
were just questions about events, for he had 
seen with his eyes and he had heard with his 
ears and he had handled with his hands and he 
knew. 

The pity of it is, not a word of this con- 
versation has been preserved. We can im- 
agine what some of the questions were and we 
can guess what some of the answers would be, 
but the actual words are gone. They are lost 
forever. What we do know, however, is 
that at the end of these fifteen days of wonder- 



82 ST. PAUL THE HERO 

ful talk, Saul went away from Jerusalem, his 
mind stored with truth about Jesus. He had 
heard from Peter's lips the supreme facts 
about the life of the Person who was hence- 
forth to be Lord and Master of his own life. 
Peter and James told all their friends in 
Jerusalem what had happened to Saul, how 
his career had suddenly changed, how the 
man who once dragged harmless Christians 
to prison was now getting ready to give his 
whole life to the work of telling the good news 
about Jesus and they already saw that a 
mighty champion of the truth had joined them 
and they all thanked God for Saul of Tarsus. 
When he left Jerusalem, after his memorable 
visit with Peter, Saul probably went home to 
Tarsus, and he lived and worked for a time 
in the home province of Cilicia. There is a 
long period of his life at this time about which 
we know nothing at all. He must have been 
at work for he could not settle down and rest. 
There was a tremendous drive in his glowing 



FIFTEEN WONDERFUL DAYS 83 

spirit, and wherever he was something was 
always happening. If he spent some years 
in Tarsus, as is probable, it is certain that 
many people there heard of Jesus from 
him and we can well believe that he went 
from town to town through the mountain 
province to tell in all the synagogues the truth 
which he had learned. 

It is possible, however, that he may at this 
time have had a long period of serious illness. 
He has himself given us one single glimpse 
into this unknown period of his life. In the 
twelfth chapter of Second Corinthians, he 
says that a tremendous experience came to him 
fourteen years before — that would be in this 
period. He was suddenly "caught up" into 
a higher world where he saw what nobody can 
see with ordinary eyes and where he under- 
stood the mysteries of life in a new way. It 
seemed for a moment as though he had lost his 
body and found his soul, as though he had 
leaped across all the space of the universe and 



84 ST. PAUL THE HERO 

had come to God's dwelling-place and every- 
thing lay plain and clear before him. But 
about this time, he says further, some terrible 
illness came upon him, which was so bad that 
it felt like "a thorn," or "a stake in his body" 
— a piercing, racking pain that seemed to bore 
into his quivering flesh. It was almost more 
than he could endure. He begged and be- 
sought that he might be relieved of it but it 
lasted on and on. We do not know certainly 
what this painful disease was but perhaps a 
little later, as we go on with his life, we may 
get some idea of what it was, for it appears to 
have come back again when he was in Galatia. 
What we do know is that, while he was 
living in Tarsus, a man named Barnabas 
thought of Saul and came to Tarsus to find 
him. Barnabas was another man something 
like Stephen. He saw farther than most of 
the others did. He was always ready for new 
things and he was full of faith and activity. 
Like Saul, he could not rest — he wanted to tell 



FIFTEEN WONDERFUL DAYS 85 

everybody what he had discovered. He 
heard of a new movement in the great city of 
Antioch, the capital of the province of Syria, 
and he went off to Antioch to see what this 
movement really was. When he got there he 
found that some followers of Jesus who had 
been forced to leave Jerusalem, because of the 
persecutions, had come to Antioch and had 
begun a little church there and were preach- 
ing to everybody who would listen. It did 
not make any difference to them whether the 
people who came to hear were Jews or not. 
They were as ready to tell the good news about 
Christ to Greeks as to the people of their 
own race. It was the first time and the first 
place in all the world that anybody had done 
this. In Jerusalem, "those of the way" were 
all Jews and they had nothing to do with any- 
body else. They never dreamed that peoples 
of all races were alike and were equally dear 
to God and that Christ came to bless and save 
all men. They made a sharp distinction be- 



86 ST. PAUL THE HERO 

tween Jews and Gentiles. But in Antioch it 
was all different. Those who formed the 
church in Antioch forgot about race and 
thought only about brotherhood. Greeks 
flocked into the same room with Jews and 
together they worshipped God like brothers. 
And here in Antioch where this new spirit was 
born and where this new movement began, the 
followers of Christ were for the first time 
called "Christians." In Jerusalem this word 
was not used or thought of, because no outside 
people came in and there was no need of a new 
name. But in Antioch where the Greeks 
joined the movement and where everybody 
discovered that a new religion was born they 
needed a word to name it with and so they 
called these persons who talked so much 
about Christ, "Christians." Barnabas was 
filled with joy when he found what 
was going on in Antioch. It looked like 
the beginning of a movement that would sweep 
across the world and change the whole em- 



FIFTEEN WONDERFUL DAYS 87 

pire. He saw at once that he must have the 
best man whom he could find to help him push 
the work along, and as he sat thinking of the 
different persons who could do this great 
work, suddenly he remembered the young man 
whose persecutions had driven these first 
Christians to Antioch and he knew that Saul 
was now a changed man and a powerful 
champion of the truth. Whereupon he hur- 
ried off through the Syrian gate in the moun- 
tains to fetch Saul to Antioch and Saul went 
back with him to begin the greatest work any 
man has ever done in the world. 



XII 

THE FIRST GREAT MISSIONARY JOURNEY 

ANTIOCH, the great Syrian city, from this 
time on became Saul's new home. He was 
henceforth to be very closely connected with 
the flourishing capital of Syria. This was 
now to be the mother-church of all his ac- 
tivities. From Antioch he started out on 
all his missionary journeys and he came back 
to Antioch at the end of each of his far-reach- 
ing travels. Here were faithful Christians 
praying for him as he worked and suffered 
and here, when he arrived weary and worn 
with labour, were dear friends to welcome 
him and to refresh him. Antioch was the 
first city in the world to have Gentile Chris- 
tians in it and it was from this city that Chris- 
tianity spread out over the world and con- 



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FIRST MISSIONARY JOURNEY 89 

quered the Roman Empire and became a 
world movement, and, as we shall see, the man 
from Tarsus was in this great undertaking the 
foremost leader and the untiring worker. 

For a whole year Barnabas and Saul 
worked in the city of Antioch, spreading the 
knowledge of Christ through that region, 
gathering in new people all the time, teaching 
them the truth and helping them to live the 
new way. It was joyous work and while they 
were doing it they were constantly discover- 
ing fresh light and were learning all the time 
how to tell the world their "good news" and 
how to build churches out of people who had 
before been heathen and idol-worshippers. 
At the end of the first year when the Antioch 
church had become strong and vigorous — full 
of life and power — Barnabas and Saul de- 
cided, with the approval of the entire church, 
to go out and tell their message to the great 
world around them. They felt sure that God 
called them to be missionaries and they re- 



9o ST. PAUL THE HERO 

solved to go wherever He wanted them to go 
and to do whatever they felt in their hearts 
that He wanted them to do. These two men 
took with them as their companion and helper 
a third man, named John Mark, who had come 
from Jerusalem to Antioch and who was 
Barnabas' nephew. It was probably this 
young man who later in life wrote the won- 
derful book which we call "The Gospel ac- 
cording to Mark." 

The whole church came together for a very 
solemn meeting and prayed for the travellers 
and then the three men, full of joy and en- 
thusiasm, set out on their journey down the 
river to Selucia, where they took ship for the 
island of Cyprus which lies west of the Syrian 
coast. They visited all the cities of the island, 
going from the eastern end across to the 
western edge, to the city of Paphos where the 
governor of the island lived. This governor 
was greatly impressed with the message and 
the extraordinary power of the missionaries 



FIRST MISSIONARY JOURNEY 91 

and he, Roman as he was, believed the won- 
derful new truths which they told him about 
God and about the Christ who had come to 
reveal Him. 

From Paphos the little band of travellers 
struck out for a new field of work. They had 
been so successful in Cyprus that they now de- 
cided to attack a still larger and more diffi- 
cult region of the earth. They sailed almost 
north from Paphos, to the shores of the 
Mediterranean, lying west of the Taurus 
mountains over which Saul gazed as a boy. 
They landed in the district of Pamphilia and 
came to the city of Perga, a little way in from 
the Sea. From this time on, our hero is never 
called Saul any more. His name suddenly 
changes here to Paul. It is probably due to 
the fact that the field of his work is now 
widening out to the Gentile world. He is 
leaving behind the narrow circle of his own 
people who always called him by his Jewish 
name and he is going out among the Greeks 



92 ST. PAUL THE HERO 

who henceforth call him by his Greek name, 
that has become so familiar to us. 

Three things that concern our story seem 
to have happened at Perga. Paul appears 
to have been taken ill here with some dan- 
gerous disease. It was probably a return of 
the trouble which he had a few years before 
and which he called "a stake in his flesh." 
The reason why we think he was taken ill 
here is that he wrote afterwards to his friends 
in Galatia that he came to them because he 
had an illness, and he seems to have gone di- 
rectly to Galatia now from Perga. The ill- 
ness may quite likely have been malaria, 
though there is no way to prove it. The few 
references to his trouble have made some 
scholars think that it was malaria — a disease 
which comes back again and again and is 
dreadfully annoying to a person who wants to 
do a great work. The low land of Pamphilia 
may quite likely have brought on a new attack 
and compelled our travellers to move up to a 



FIRST MISSIONARY JOURNEY 93 

higher and healthier region. Anyway whether 
this theory is correct or not, Paul and Barna- 
bas decided to push on farther north to the hill 
country of Pisidia. This was the second of 
the three things. And the third was that 
Mark refused to go on with them. Something 
about the undertaking disturbed and fright- 
ened him. He turned back and went off 
home. Paul did not like Mark's desertion, 
but Barnabas, who was his uncle, did not treat 
it as quite so serious. 

The two men now started off alone up over 
the hills and through the dangerous robber- 
infested country to the finely situated city of 
Antioch in Pisidia, which my reader must re- 
member is very different from the other Anti- 
och in Syria, from which Paul started on his 
journey. This second Antioch is in the 
Roman province of Galatia and we must now 
realise that on this first great missionary jour- 
ney of his life Paul came to one of the cities 
of Galatia where, so far as we know, he 



94 ST. PAUL THE HERO 

founded the first of his missionary churches. 
He began his work in the Jewish Synagogue 
in Antioch of Pisidia and he and Barnabas 
preached to the Jews of that city and to the 
other people who sympathised with them and 
who were called "God-fearers" because they 
were eager to learn about the God of the Jews. 
But after a little time the Jews disagreed with 
the message which the missionaries brought 
them and so Paul and Barnabas gave up try- 
ing to convince the Jews and set to work to 
tell their good news to the Greeks, just as 
they had done in Syrian Antioch, and these 
people flocked to hear them and believed their 
message with great joy, and were ready almost 
to pluck out their eyes and give them to Paul. 
From this first city of the Galatian province 
they went on to other important cities of the 
same province — Iconium, Derbe and Lystra. 
These four cities, we shall now assume, were 
the four centres of the churches of Galatia. 
One remarkable incident happened while 



FIRST MISSIONARY JOURNEY 95 

Paul and Barnabas were working in the city 
of Lystra. The simple country people here 
made up their minds that Paul and Barnabas 
must be gods come down from heaven to visit 
them and they brought out their oxen and 
were ready to sacrifice them to Barnabas and 
Paul, who they thought were Jupiter and 
Mercury. It was here in this very region 
around Lystra that Baucis and Philemon once 
lived. And according to the old Greek 
stories, Jupiter and Mercury came down to 
earth on a visit. They came looking like 
common men and nobody knew that they 
were gods and when they came to men's 
houses asking to be taken in and entertained, 
nobody would receive them. Finally they 
came to the poverty-stricken home of Baucis 
and Philemon, who received their visitors with 
much joy. They killed their only chicken 
for the supper and did the best they could to 
show true hospitality. Suddenly the two 
visitors stood forth as mighty gods. They 



96 ST. PAUL THE HERO 

blessed and thanked Baucis and Philemon and 
turned their humble dwelling into a splendid 
temple and glorified the two poor people who 
had received them so kindly. 

Well, these simple people at Lystra evi- 
dently thought when they listened to Paul and 
Barnabas and saw their wonderful deeds that 
Jupiter and Mercury had come back again and 
they were resolved not to make a second mis- 
take and miss the blessing. Paul and Barna- 
bas had no desire to be treated as gods nor to 
have sacrifices made to them, but they had 
difficult work getting the simple hearted peo- 
ple to treat them as men and to drive their 
oxen home. 



XIII 

THE FIRST GREAT PROBLEM 

PAUL and Barnabas had another experience 
at Lystra which was very different from that 
of being taken for gods. Paul's own people, 
the Jews, had begun to see now that he was 
not like them. He did not care for the things 
which were as important to them as life. His 
entire interest lay in telling not about Moses 
and his law but about Christ and the new life 
which men could live in His power. To the 
faithful Jews he seemed like a traitor. They 
did not want to hear him preach and they 
were determined to make him stop telling 
these new things to the people, if they possibly 
could. 

The Jews got together from the cities which 
Paul and Barnabas had visited and they came 

97 



98 ST. PAUL THE HERO 

in a body to Lystra and stirred up the fickle, 
changeable peasants and set them against the 
missionaries who had come to help them. 
They dragged them out of the city and stoned 
them until they thought they were dead. 
Paul must have thought of Stephen as the 
stones rained down upon him and he knew 
now how it felt to be stoned by the very peo- 
ple he wanted most to help. Fortunately the 
stones did not kill him. They only wounded 
him severely and when the mob had gone 
away he got up and came back into the city 
and preached again to his friends who had 
learned to love him and to believe in him. 
The next day he and Barnabas left Lystra and 
went to Derbe. Then they returned and re- 
visited all the churches they had started in 
Galatia — in Derbe, Lystra, Iconium and 
Antioch of Pisidia, after which they went back 
to their home-church in great Antioch. It 
must have been a happy moment, as the two 
travellers sat in the midst of the group at 



FIRST GREAT PROBLEM 99 

Antioch and told of the wonderful events of 
their long and dangerous journey and as they 
related how in the far-away province of Gala- 
tia they had built up new and flourishing 
churches out of people who just before had 
been ignorant heathen. But the happiness 
and joy were not long undisturbed, for some 
members of the church in Jerusalem came to 
Antioch and told the Christians there that 
Paul was wrong in his ideas and in his teach- 
ing, that Barnabas was wrong and that the 
church there in Antioch was wrong. These 
men insisted that nobody except Jews could 
be Christians. If any Gentile wanted to be a 
Christian and come into the church, they said 
that he must first be circumcised and become 
a Jew and he must keep the whole law of 
Moses. Christ came only for Jews, they said. 
If anybody went about teaching that Greeks 
and barbarians and men of all races and all 
customs could be Christ's followers, that man 
was wrong and was a dangerous teacher. 



ioo ST. PAUL THE HERO 

What these people said struck right against 
everything Paul was doing. According to 
their views most of the people in the church 
at Antioch were not real Christians. They 
would have to change all their ways of living. 
They would need to accept the whole system 
of Moses and all the sacrifices set forth in the 
Old Testament before they could have any 
part in Christ and His "good news." 

Paul was determined not to yield to these 
men from Jerusalem and he saw that he must 
go to Jerusalem himself and prove to the 
whole church there that this idea that only 
Jews could be Christians was false. He must 
make them see that the new idea which he 
and the Christians at Antioch held was true 
and right; the idea that all men everywhere, 
of every race and of every colour and of every 
custom could follow Christ and come to God 
through Him and live by the power of His 
Spirit without becoming Jews at all. 

Paul and Barnabas, with one of their new 



FIRST GREAT PROBLEM 101 

converts, Titus, who was a Greek and who had 
never become a Jew, went together to Jerusa- 
lem to have a council with the church there 
and to settle forever, if they could, this impor- 
tant and difficult question. Paul threw him- 
self into the discussion with all the earnestness 
and fire that were in his nature. He brought 
in Titus, as a specimen and exhibit of the kind 
of Christians the Greeks made when they gave 
their lives to Christ. Paul refused to let 
Titus be circumcised. He declared that 
Titus was already a full Christian without 
doing anything to make himself a Jew. As 
Paul talked and showed what Christ meant to 
him and told of the wonderful things Christ 
had done through him the men in Jerusalem 
who had been disciples of Christ were con- 
vinced that he was right and they gave him 
their hands as a token of their faith in him and 
of their regard for him. But the other 
members of the church were not yet ready for 
the new teaching and the new ideas. They 



102 ST. PAUL THE HERO 

were old-fashioned people who could not 
change their habits. They listened to Paul 
and were impressed with his shining face and 
his glowing words, but when he was done 
speaking they thought just as they did before! 
Soon after he had returned from the great 
conference in Jerusalem, when he thought he 
had convinced the church in Jerusalem that 
his position was the right one, he heard that 
men from Jerusalem had gone to the cities in 
Galatia and had told his new converts there 
— in Derbe and Lystra and Iconium and in 
Pisidia — that the two missionaries, who had 
recently visited them and had told them about 
Christ, were false teachers and had led them 
astray. These Jerusalem men worked upon 
the simple-minded Galatian people until they 
made them really believe that Paul and Barna- 
bas were wrong. Their new visitors told the 
people in Galatia that they must go on now 
and become Jews. They must be circumcised 
and keep the law of Moses and they said that 



FIRST GREAT PROBLEM 103 

if they did that they could have the privilege 
of enjoying Christ. But if they did not do 
that, then they could have no part in Christ. 

It was an unspeakable shock to Paul when 
this piece of news reached him about his 
Galatian friends. He saw how helpless they 
had been. He realised how hard it would be 
to answer their visitors and he knew that these 
simple peasants were not to blame for being 
confused. But he quickly saw that he must 
save them. He must not let them go astray. 
He must come to their help and he must write 
them a letter that would open their eyes and 
show them the full truth. I am inclined to 
think this letter was the first of all his wonder- 
ful epistles. We must turn and see how the 
great leader wrote to his beloved friends and 
young disciples in the hill country of Galatia. 



XIV 

A LETTER TO HIS CHURCHES 

WHEN Paul sat down to write to the 
churches in the province of Galatia he was 
facing one of the greatest crises of his life. If 
he could not convince them that he was right 
in his teaching and that all men everywhere 
could follow Christ and become His disciples, 
then his missionary work was ended and his 
career was over. He had been proud once to 
be a Jew. He had gloried in the privilege of 
belonging to the chosen people and he had 
hoped to become perfectly righteous by keep- 
ing all the law and the commandments. He 
had tried this plan with all his energy and it 
had miserably failed. He had never made 
himself perfect and he had discovered that 

nobody ever could reach perfection that way. 

104 



A LETTER 105 

Just at the moment when he realised his fail- 
ure most, he had suddenly found Christ and 
through His life and power he had learned 
how to live in joy and peace and triumph. It 
was the most wonderful discovery! The 
whole world seemed new and all nature 
seemed changed! The whole business of his 
life was to go out and tell people everywhere 
about his discovery and what it meant. 

And now these men from Jerusalem had 
gone out to his new churches and made them 
think that all his work was wrong, that all that 
he told them was false. They must become 
Jews. They must try with all their might 
to keep the law. They must do what Paul 
had endeavoured to do before he found 
Christ. They must strain and struggle on, 
all their lives, to make themselves good, and 
then, if they succeeded, they could enjoy 
Christ. It seemed to Paul a pitiful drop from 
his great and wonderful message. He could 
never go out and tell people that. If his dis- 



106 ST. PAUL THE HERO 

covery and his message were not true, then he 
could never go out again on a missionary 
journey. There was nothing left for him but 
to go back to Tarsus and make tents and then 
to die and be buried like the rest of men. 
Now if ever he must make his new converts 
see and understand his discovery and he must 
absolutely convince them that he was right 
and that God was with him. That is what 
the Epistle to the Galatians was written for. 

Intense and eager and determined as he was, 
he was also tender and loving. This letter is 
all full of passages in which you can almost 
feel this great man's heart throb. "You are," 
he tells them, "just like my own children. I 
came to you when you were living in sin and 
ignorance and, like a father full of love, I 
helped you into a new life. I brought you to 
Christ and I showed you how to get free from 
your old bondage and how to rise into a life 
of joy and power. I cannot bear to see youi 
drop back into bondage again. If you believe 



A LETTER 107 

what these visitors have told you, you will 
never be free again, you will have to carry 
burdens all your days." "When I came first 
among you," he wrote, "you were full of joy. 
You loved me and believed me, as though I 
had been an angel or a god come to visit you. 
You would have plucked out your eyes and 
given them to me, if you could have done it. 
I want now to be your friend and I want you 
to believe that what I tell you is the truth." 
Then he showed them how foolish was the 
story which the Jews from Jerusalem had told 
them. They had said that only those who 
were "sons of Abraham" could share in the 
promises of Christ. "Sons of Abraham," 
Paul cried out to them, "who are the real sons 
of Abraham!" "Not those who become Jews 
and keep the law but those who are full of 
faith, who trust Christ and live by His power. 
The most wonderful thing about Abraham 
was his faith. He believed God. He trusted 
God. He walked with God. He did not 



108 ST. PAUL THE HERO 

keep the law, because the law was not given 
until many centuries after Abraham had died. 
If you want to be 'a son of Abraham' you 
must live by faith. You must trust God and 
take Christ for your leader, your helper, your 
inward strength." 

He drew, in his letter, a wonderful picture 
of the true way to live. He gave his friends 
an account of his own life and told them they 
could also have what had come to him. 
"Why," he said, "God has revealed His Son 
in my soul. I used to do wrong and go wrong. 
I could not keep myself. I tried to live by 
the law but it would not work. Now I live 
by faith — faith in Christ, and the life I now 
live is really the life He lives in me. I do 
not care any more for the things people do 
to make themselves good. I feel Christ com- 
ing into me and giving me strength and power, 
just as the sun comes into the tree and builds 
its life from within. You can all have that 
power formed in you. You can all feel the 



A LETTER 109 

life of Christ sweep into your lives and that 
will make you free. And you will cry 'Abba, 
Father,' for you will find the life and spirit 
of God in your own hearts. When that hap- 
pens you will not think much about those 
things which these Jews from Jerusalem have 
been telling you you must do to be saved! 

"There are two great forces in the world,'' 
he told them. "One is the force that makes 
people do wrong. There seems to be some- 
thing in us too strong for us to resist. We 
mean to do right, but often before we know it, 
something seems to push us into evil. We go 
the way of instinct. We fight, or we tell lies, 
or we take what is not ours, or we get angry, 
or we do things which are not pure and clean 
and beautiful. How are we to stop this force 
from pushing us and controlling us and spoil- 
ing us?" "You must get a new spirit," Paul 
says. "The law and the commandments and 
the customs of Moses will not bring you life 
and power. You must find a new and higher 



no ST. PAUL THE HERO 

force which will come into you and raise you 
out of your old self into a new way of life. 
Just that is what Christ does. When He helps 
you and comes into you, a new spirit is formed 
and you get love, joy, peace, patience, kind- 
ness, goodness, faithfulness, meekness, and en- 
durance in your own souls. It is like discov- 
ering a new world. It is like a new creation. 
That is what Christ does. He makes people 
new creatures. These people who came to 
you from Jerusalem cannot tell you how to 
do that — but I can tell you. I bear in my 
body the marks of this new creation which 
Christ has formed in me." 

Something like that Paul wrote to his 
friends in Galatia and the best of it is, they 
believed him and stood by him. When they 
had read his letter, they said: Paul is right. 
It is so. We will take his way. We will 
have Christ and not the law-system — and so 
Paul had won his first great battle. 



XV 

"COME OVER INTO MACEDONIA AND 
HELP US" 

THE old heroes of Greece were heroes be- 
cause they went out to fight with beasts and to 
free the world of terrible monsters. Then, 
again, there were heroes who fought with 
giants, or with deadly enemies of their coun- 
try, and who risked their lives for their friends 
or for their people. Paul was a new kind 
of hero. His great battle was a battle with 
false ideas, a battle for the truth, a battle for 
the good news which Christ had brought to 
the world. It is harder to be this kind of a 
hero. Most people do not recognise the new 
kind of hero when he comes. They do not 
know that he is a hero. He often has to fight 
alone and he is misunderstood even by his 



ii2 ST. PAUL THE HERO 

friends. Paul had many lonely hours. He 
could not have stood the strain and struggle 
if he had not been sure of Christ's presence 
and help and if he had not known that he was 
the champion of the greatest truth in the 
world. 

Now that he had won the victory in this 
important contest in Galatia, and now that he 
had settled the question that Christ was the 
Saviour of all men of all races, he could go out 
again on another great out-reaching mission- 
ary journey. Paul wanted to go again with 
Barnabas, but Barnabas was determined to 
take Mark once more as companion and Paul 
was just as determined not to have Mark, be- 
cause he deserted them on their former jour- 
ney, so that they finally agreed to separate. 
Barnabas went to Cyprus with Mark, and 
Paul took a companion named Silas, and 
started out without quite knowing what coun- 
try he would travel to before his return. He 
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"COME OVER AND HELP US" 113 

Syrian gate in the mountains, to Tarsus and 
visited the Christian settlements in the prov- 
ince of Cilicia, then directly on to see his 
friends in Galatia who had been through so 
much since he saw them last. How we wish 
we knew what he said to them and what they 
said to him! But we do not know a single 
word that passed while Paul was living among 
the disciples of Galatia. We only know that 
he decided to take one of these Galatian Chris- 
tians along with him as a helper in his work. 
This was a young man named Timothy whose 
home was in Derbe. He became one of 
Paul's greatest friends and a wonderful help 
to him, clear through to the end of his life. 
Being with Paul made Timothy a hero too. 

After the three men had visited all the 
communities of Galatia, they started of! to- 
ward the north and visited the cities in the 
district of Phrygia which belonged to the 
province of Galatia, and then they decided to 
strike across west and visit the great cities of 



ii4 ST. PAUL THE HERO 

the province of Asia, the capital of which was 
Ephesus, but they soon felt that the time had 
not come yet for this journey. They next 
tried to go to the country lying along the 
shores of the Black Sea, but something made 
them realise that this was not the right course 
for them to take, so that they went on to 
Troas on the shores of the iEgean Sea, with- 
out quite knowing where they would go next. 
Troas was the site of the old city of Troy 
where the Greeks and Trojans fought for 
ten years, and where some of the bravest deeds 
were done that the world ever saw. Here 
was the tomb of Achilles. Here Alexander 
the Great had come on his way to the conquest 
of the world. A greater conqueror had now 
come to Troas. Alexander went toward the 
east for his victories; the new conqueror was 
to go west ! 

While they were here in Troas without any 
clear plan of action, Paul felt in his soul that 
the next course was to sail across the iEgean 



"COME OVER AND HELP US" 115 

Sea into Europe. He felt it so clearly and 
strongly that it seemed to him as though he 
heard a man from the European side of the 
sea calling to him and saying: "Come across 
into Macedonia and bring us help." But it 
was more than Macedonia that was calling. 
It was the whole of Greece. It was more 
than Greece that was calling. It was the 
whole of Europe. It was more than Europe 
that was calling. It was undiscovered 
America that was stretching out its hands that 
night and saying: "Come over and help us." 
You see, if Paul had not gone into Europe, 
across the iEgean, perhaps we who live in 
America and in England would never have 
been followers of Christ, so that this call meant 
very much! Paul heard it and he was 
"ready" at once. He answered: "Yes, I 
will come." The next morning he set sail 
from Troas on the eastern shore to Philippi on 
the western shore of the iEgean. Silas and 
Timothy were with him and he also found 



n6 ST. PAUL THE HERO 

here a new companion. This new travelling- 
companion kept a Diary and wrote the ac- 
count of this journey and of other journeys, 
too. You can find his Diary in the sections 
of the Book of Acts that say "we"— "the We 
Narratives." Philippi in Macedonia is the 
first spot in Europe on which Paul set his foot 
and so far as we know the people in Philippi 
were the first people of all Europe who heard 
of Christ. They were not as eager to hear as 
you might expect. If they were calling to 
Paul to come over and help them, they did not 
recognise him when he arrived, for they very 
soon seized him and put him in prison and 
beat him with rods. Some of the people 
in Philippi, however, did recognise him. 
They were very glad to hear him and they 
were full of love for him and for his truth. 
They joined him and worked with him and a 
new church was formed — perhaps the first in 
all Europe. These Christians in Philippi 
were very dear to Paul's heart and they loved 



"COME OVER AND HELP US" 117 

him as though he had been their own father, 
and they remembered him later when he lay 
in prison in Rome and was lonely. When he 
left Philippi, he went on through the great 
cities of Macedonia, preaching and building 
up churches, wherever he could find people 
ready to listen to his message. In the city of 
Thessalonica, which is now called Salonika, 
Paul found many listeners and formed a suc- 
cessful church to which a little later he wrote 
two epistles. He found another splendid 
group in the city of Bercea and formed a 
church there. But in all these cities of Mace- 
donia he had serious trouble, just as he had 
had in the province of Galatia. The Jews 
hated him and everywhere he came they 
raised a riot and tried to drive him out of the 
city or to get him into prison. They set the 
mob against him in some of the cities and in 
others they had him arrested and badly 
treated. But in spite of all their efforts to 
hinder him, he succeeded in doing a great 



u8 ST. PAUL THE HERO 

work and in forming Christian churches all 
up and down the famous province of Mace- 
donia. 

From the time Paul heard the voice calling 
him over into Macedonia, most of the rest of 
his life was to be lived and most of his future 
work in the world was to be done around the 
shores of the iEgean Sea. All the churches 
which he gathered after this time were around 
the iEgean and all his epistles from this time 
were written either to ^Egean cities, or written 
while he was living in iEgean cities. It was 
Paul who shifted the centre of Christianity 
from Jerusalem to the Western World and 
during his life-time the great centres were 
around the shores of this famous Sea. The 
most famous of all the cities around the coasts 
of this Sea was Athens, the home of Socrates 
and Plato and of a hundred other great men, 
and to this wonderful city of the ancient world 
Paul now came. 



XVI 

ALONE IN ATHENS 

As Paul's two companions, Silas and Tim- 
othy, had been left behind in Beroea to finish 
the work which had been begun in Macedonia 
Paul found himself "alone in Athens." It 
was the most interesting city in the world for 
a traveller to visit. It was the "eye of 
Greece" and Greece had for five hundred 
years been leading the world in art, in poetry, 
in philosophy, in architecture and in many 
other things. The most beautiful temples 
that had ever been built were there for Paul 
to see. The most wonderful statues that had 
ever been carved were there for him to gaze 
upon. The most perfect poems that had ever 
been written were in the libraries there in 

Athens for him to read. A short walk would 

119 



120 ST. PAUL THE HERO 

take him to the garden of the Academe where 
Plato once had his school. He could stand 
where Socrates stood. He could see the home 
of Stoic philosophy which he had heard about 
all his life. He was under the most perfect 
sky the sun shines through. He looked over 
the glorious hills where great deeds had been 
wrought. Delightful air wrapped him round 
and inspiring sights met him at every turn. 

But Paul thought little of these things. 
His mind was filled with something else which 
seemed to him more important. He wanted 
to make this famous city see what he saw. He 
wanted to build a church of Christ in the city 
that had built the Parthenon. He wanted to 
tell his message of truth to the people who 
gloried in the wisdom of Plato and Aristotle. 
As he was walking about alone in the city, he 
noticed an altar with the inscription on it: 
"To God Unknown." At once, he thought, 
"How I should like to make these people know 
the God whom I know, but whom they have 



ALONE IN ATHENS 121 

not found yet. They want to find Him, or 
they would not build altars like that. All 
their philosophers have wanted to find Him, 
and sometimes they almost did find Him. 
Oh, if I could only make them see!" While 
Paul was walking around the city, wishing 
for a chance to tell his message, the Athenian 
people in the streets and market-places were 
watching him. They saw at once that he was 
a stranger and of a different race. They no- 
ticed him gazing around. Some of them 
asked him questions and sounded him to see 
whether he brought any new ideas. But they 
did not expect much from a mere Jew. They 
thought from the little they listened to that 
he believed in two gods — or a god and a god- 
dess — whom they had never heard of before, 
for he spoke of Jesus and of the resurrection. 
They thought Jesus was a new god and that 
the Resurrection was a new goddess. But 
most of the people thought that he was a 
"babbler" — a man who was talking about 



122 ST. PAUL THE HERO 

trifles. They never dreamed that this foreign 
visitor, this Jew, could teach them, wise 
Athenians as they were, anything that mat- 
tered to them. But some of the inquisitive 
and curious ones got Paul to come up to their 
great meeting-place on the Hill of Mars, 
which they called the Areopagus, and speak 
to them. That was exactly what Paul 
wanted. Now he had a chance to tell them 
his great truth. Would they listen? Would 
they understand? 

With a polite wave of the hand, he began 
to speak in the Greek which he had learned 
as a boy at Tarsus. "Athenian men," he said, 
"you are very religious people. I see altars 
everywhere and you have filled your city with 
objects of worship. One strange thing I no- 
ticed as I walked about. I saw an altar on 
which was this inscription, 'To God Un- 
known.' That means that you have not quite 
found God yet. Let me tell you about Him, 
for I know. He made the world. He made 



ALONE IN ATHENS 123 

all things above and all things beneath. But 
He does not dwell in temples. He does not 
need the things which men make with their 
hands, idols and images and statues. He has 
given life and breath to all living beings. He 
has planned the universe and put His wisdom 
into all the parts of it. He has arranged 
everything for men. He expects them to be- 
come one great family. He has put some- 
thing into men's hearts which makes them seek 
after Him and which makes them try to feel 
their way, as blind persons do, to find Him if 
they can. But He is never far away from 
anybody. He is near, within reach. We 
live in God. We move in Him. All our life 
is flooded with Him, and without Him we 
could not live at all. Your poets knew that. 
They have tried to tell you about it. One of 
them in his poem says that we are 'offspring of 
God' — we have come from Him. If that is 
true, as your poet says it is, you ought not to 
think that God is like silver or gold or marble, 



124 ST. PAUL THE HERO 

or that He can be carved and made into a 
statue. All that is childlike and is the result 
of ignorance. When men were in the child 
stage and did not know any better, God ex- 
cused them and waited for them to learn. 
But now that you are older and wiser, there is 
no excuse. God expects everybody now to 
live differently, to change their lives, and to 
prepare for the great beyond. He has sent 
His Son to show them how to do it, and He 
has raised Him from the dead." 

They did not listen very well and when they 
found that the Resurrection was not a new 
goddess they were not interested any longer. 
They drifted away to look for something that 
was more exciting and they politely told Paul 
that they would hear him again some other 
time. One man who was a senator and one 
woman, who had listened eagerly, were con- 
vinced that this was the truth about God and 
they believed and accepted Paul's way of life. 
But Athens was not ready yet for the great 



ALONE IN ATHENS 125 

message and so the chance went by! In a few 
days Paul sailed away, out of that wonderful 
harbour, looking back on the beautiful city 
that had missed its opportunity, and landed in 
the great seaport city of Corinth, at that time 
the capital of the province of Achaia. 



XVII 

CORINTH AND EPHESUS 

In Corinth Paul made two new friends 
who became very dear to him and who were 
able to be great helpers in his work. Their 
names were Aquila — a Jew from Pontus who 
had lived sometime in Italy — and his wife 
Priscilla who was a very remarkable woman. 
They became followers of Christ and joined 
with Paul in the work of spreading Christi- 
anity in the great Greek city of Corinth. 
Aquila and Priscilla were also tent-makers 
and part of the time they all worked at this 
trade to get money to live by. Then they gave 
all the rest of their time to the main business 
for which Paul had come to Corinth. It was 
a very happy group of workers for they all 

loved and enjoyed each other and they all 

126 



CORINTH AND EPHESUS 127 

loved and enjoyed their work. As Corinth 
was a great city close to the sea, people from 
all countries in the world came there. There 
were men of many colours and men of many 
languages. They had not learned how to live 
good and beautiful lives. Very wrong things 
were done in Corinth. We sometimes think 
that the world is wicked to-day but if we could 
see the way the Corinthians lived and then see 
how men live to-day we should discover that 
there has been some improvement. 

For a year and a half, this little group of 
missionaries laboured in the city, telling about 
Christ and His love and His death for men 
and His resurrection and of His Spirit work- 
ing in the hearts of men. All kinds of peo- 
ple were changed by the power of this mes- 
sage. Jews and Greeks and persons from 
many lands listened and rejoiced and believed 
and followed Christ. Paul's old enemies, the 
Jews, who had heard about his past life, made 
all the trouble they could for him, but he had 



128 ST. PAUL THE HERO 

been through trouble before and he knew how 
to bear it now. He went straight ahead with 
his work and was not disturbed by the diffi- 
culties. His soul was rilled with joy as he 
saw his little church growing larger every 
day. New persons kept coming and there 
were more all the time who were trying to 
live the new way. All kinds of people came 
in to form the new church in Corinth. A 
few of them were learned and well off, but 
most of them were poor and ignorant. They 
were working people who had never had any 
real life before, and now the whole world 
seemed changed for them. It was as though 
they had been living in a dark cave before and 
now they had come into the beautiful world 
where the bright sun was shining. 

After eighteen months of this hard and 
happy work, Paul, with his two companions, 
and with his two new friends, sailed away 
from Corinth, leaving behind a great group 
of Christian men and women and children 



CORINTH AND EPHESUS 129 

gathered into a church. We can well believe 
that all these people, who had found the new 
life, were on the shore of the harbour at 
Cenchrea to say "farewell" and to wave their 
last greetings as the missionaries pushed out 
to sea. They sailed in and out among the 
famous islands of the iEgean and across its 
blue waters to the eastern shore and came to 
Ephesus. Paul had wanted to go to Ephesus 
at the beginning of this long missionary jour- 
ney, but he had not been able to accomplish 
his desire then. Now after wonderful expe- 
riences, dangers and trials and after many 
months of work in Europe he found himself at 
last in the great city of Ephesus. He knew 
that this was to be one of the most important 
fields of his entire lifework, but he still felt 
that the time for his work in Ephesus had not 
come yet. So he left Aquila and Priscilla 
there and went on by ship to Caesarea and then 
to his beloved home church group at Antioch. 
There were many things to tell as the Chris- 



130 ST. PAUL THE HERO 

tian Jews and Greeks of Antioch flocked in to 
hear Paul recount the wonderful events of the 
greatest journey of his life. How the field 
had widened and how Christianity had spread 
in these eventful years since he last saw Anti- 
och! After a short stay at Antioch, Paul 
went once more, and this was to be the last 
time, to see his dear friends in Galatia. 
When this visit was finished, he came over the 
great stretch of country which formed the an- 
cient province of Asia to its capital, Ephesus. 
He had made a little beginning of work here 
before his return to Antioch and now he came 
back to finish what he had begun. 

Ephesus was much larger than Corinth and 
it was also, like Corinth, a very wicked city. 
There was much to do here and much to suf- 
fer before Ephesus could be changed into a 
city of pure and beautiful citizens. But noth- 
ing ever discouraged Paul. He went at his 
great task as though he fully expected to see 
it done. It was like fighting beasts in the 



CORINTH AND EPHESUS 131 

arena to work among the hard and wicked 
people who tried every way they could to de- 
feat Paul and spoil his work. Steadily he 
fought on — gaining a little all the time — ex- 
plaining to everybody who came to hear and 
proving that he had found a new way to live. 

Right in the midst of this great work of 
transforming and remaking Ephesus, Paul 
heard very bad news from Corinth, across the 
iEgean. He heard that the church there was 
in sad trouble. The people had divided into 
parties and were quarrelling. Some of the 
people had gone wrong and were doing the 
kind of things they used to do when they were 
heathen. Paul wrote a wonderful letter to 
them — our First Corinthians. It was full of 
good advice and counsel and it showed them 
how to get back into the new way of living. 
The most wonderful thing in the letter was 
what Paul said to them about love. He told 
them, in the most beautiful words that per- 
haps were ever written that love was the 



132 ST. PAUL THE HERO 

greatest thing in the world, that when every- 
thing else failed love would not fail and when 
everything else vanished away love would still 
abide. 

You would have thought this letter would 
have settled all their troubles but it did not. 
When people get wrong it is very hard setting 
them right again and it often takes a long time 
and much patience. Things went from bad 
to worse. Finally Paul had to leave his work 
in Ephesus and go across to Corinth, to see the 
people there in person and to straighten out 
their trouble. But even w r hen he got among 
them, they remained stubborn and difficult, 
and he had to go back without getting the 
trouble settled. Then he sent Timothy over 
and he failed. It looked as though the 
church would fall to pieces and Paul would 
lose all his friends in Corinth. Then he 
wrote another letter, full of pleading, which 
he sent by his friend Titus, who was now his 
companion. 



CORINTH AND EPHESUS 133 

While he was waiting, full of anxiety, for 
Titus to come back with the answer from 
Corinth, some dreadful catastrophe happened 
in Ephesus. There was a great uprising in 
the city against Paul. It seemed for a time as 
though there was no hope that his life could 
be saved. He has told us that the sentence 
of death was pronounced against him — prob- 
ably the sentence that he should be thrown 
into the arena to fight with lions. For a time 
there seemed no hope. But his friends 
Aquila and Priscilla, whom Paul sometimes 
calls "Prisca," saved his life. He says that 
they "risked their necks" for him and that he 
was "delivered from death." 

This catastrophe may very likely be con- 
nected in some way with the strange event so 
powerfully described in the nineteenth chap- 
ter of Acts. It happened this way. There 
was a man in Ephesus named Demetrius. He 
was a silversmith and made little silver im- 
ages of the goddess Diana which he sold in 



134 ST. PAUL THE HERO 

great numbers to the people. These images 
were little copies of the great statue of Diana 
which the Ephesians believed had fallen down 
from heaven, and so it was looked upon with 
awe and was very sacred. One of the most 
beautiful temples in the world — one of the 
seven "wonders" — had been built to Diana in 
Ephesus and in this temple stood the famous 
statue. Now Demetrius made a great deal 
of money selling his silver images to those 
who visited the temple. But suddenly he 
discovered that people were not buying as 
many of his silver Dianas as they used to do. 
He began to wonder what was happening and 
he hit upon the idea that all the trouble was 
caused by the preaching of Paul! Paul was 
calling people to Christ and when they be- 
lieved in Christ, they no longer worshipped 
Diana. They stopped going to her temple 
and they did not care to have copies of the 
great statue. Demetrius was losing money. 
His business was in danger. Something must 



CORINTH AND EPHESUS 135 

be done. He called together all the silver- 
smiths and stirred them up to do something 
at once to drive Paul out of the city. "Just 
see," he cried, "how our trade is going down! 
We are losing all our business ! We are mak- 
ing no money! This stranger has come to 
our city and he has told people that gods are 
not made of silver and gold; that gods made 
by hands are no gods at all! He has carried 
people away with his new ideas. They won't 
buy our images now. Not only is our busi- 
ness in danger, but our whole city will suffer 
as well. People will stop coming to see the 
great temple which all the world admired. 
We must act. We must save the city and 
defend the great goddess!" Then all the 
silversmiths and goldsmiths and coppersmiths 
and workers in iron and brass began to make 
processions through the city, shouting as they 
marched, "Great is Diana of the Ephesians." 
"Great is Diana of the Ephesians." The 
whole city was aroused. People rushed out 



136 ST. PAUL THE HERO 

of their houses to see what was happening 
and a great commotion and excitement fol- 
lowed. The throng pressed into the immense 
city theatre and everybody kept shouting, 
some one thing and some another, as gener- 
ally happens in a vast mob of excited people. 
Paul tried to get into the theatre. He was, 
as usual, ready to face the danger and stand 
his ground. But his friends kept him back 
and would not let him risk his life in such a 
wild and seething and furious crowd. When 
any one tried to speak the mob drowned the 
voice of the speaker with their shouts. A 
man named Alexander — perhaps he was 
"Alexander, the coppersmith," who, Paul 
says, did him "much evil," a little later — tried 
to speak, when suddenly the vast throng of 
excited people began crying again, "Great is 
Diana of the Ephesians." " Great is Diana 
of the Ephesians." For two hours nobody 
could stop this cry which went on and on, 
with the continual shout, "Great is Diana of 



CORINTH AND EPHESUS 137 

the Ephesians." At last the town-clerk of the 
city got the people quiet and made a sensible 
speech to them, telling them if they had any 
charge against Paul the right thing to do was 
to take the matter to the courts and not to get 
up a riot and endanger the liberty and repu- 
tation of the city. Then he sent the people 
away to their homes. 

How this uproar affected Paul we do not 
know. What danger threatened him now be- 
cause of the hate of Demetrius and the silver- 
smiths we cannot tell. Nobody knows ex- 
actly what happened, but in some way Paul 
escaped from the city, never to go back again. 
He got to Troas in safety and then crossed 
over the iEgean at the same place where he 
crossed the first time he entered Europe, and 
reached Macedonia where he was among his 
friends. 

Here in Macedonia where Paul was wait- 
ing, worn and perplexed and weary — but not 
cast down — Titus came to him from Corinth 



138 ST. PAUL THE HERO 

and told him the good news that his letter to 
Corinth had done its work, had saved the day, 
and that now his church there was ready to 
be faithful to him. Nothing in his life ever 
touched his soul with more joy than did that 
report which Titus brought. If you wish to 
see how he felt, you must read the first nine 
chapters of Second Corinthians, for he wrote 
those chapters just after Titus came to him. 
It makes you love Paul to find how eagerly 
he loved his friends and his churches, and to 
see how much he suffered when they did 
wrong or turned against him. Soon after 
this he went to Corinth and spent three months 
there with his old and new friends of that city. 



XVIII 

" READY TO BE BOUND " 

THERE were many things to do in Corinth, 
on this last visit of Paul's life to the city where 
he had worked so long and suffered so much. 
He had many things to tell them. There 
were many changes to make in the manage- 
ment of the church. There were many fam- 
ilies to visit and all the time there were new 
people being added to the church. Then 
Paul was raising a great fund of money which 
he hoped to carry up to Jerusalem on his re- 
turn, for the support of the church in that 
city. Finally he had letters to write to his 
other churches, advice to give them, difficul- 
ties to settle and problems to solve. Perhaps 
the most important thing he did during this 
stay in Corinth — certainly the most impor- 

139 



140 ST. PAUL THE HERO 

tant for us — was to write a letter, which we 
now call an Epistle, to the Christians in 
the city of Rome. It is the longest of all 
Paul's Epistles and the one in which he sets 
forth most carefully and fully his entire mes- 
sage about Christ. He had not been to Rome 
yet and he had not met the Christians there, 
but he was planning to go to Rome, after he 
had been to Jerusalem, on his way to Spain 
and he wanted to prepare the Christians in 
the great capital of the empire for the teach- 
ing which he expected to give them when he 
arrived. He little thought as he was writing 
this wonderful letter that when he did come 
to Rome he would come chained to two sol- 
diers and that this would be the end of his 
journey! He told the people at Rome, in this 
letter, how hard he had tried as a young man 
to make himself perfect, how he had resolved 
to keep the law and be absolutely righteous, 
and how miserably he had failed. "When I 
meant to do right," he wrote, "I did wrong." 



"READY TO BE BOUND" 141 

"The things I wanted to do I did not do. The 
things I did, were just those things which I 
ought not to have done. And when I was 
defeated and beaten and hopeless then sud- 
denly I discovered the love of God which 
Christ revealed to me. I found a power to 
live by, which delivered me from the old 
power of sin in my nature. Now through 
that love and that power I am more than 
conqueror. I know now that nothing can 
ever separate me from the love of God. 
Neither death nor life, nor angels, nor prin- 
cipalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor 
things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any- 
thing that has ever been made in the universe, 
can separate me from the love of God in 
Christ Jesus." 

He told these unseen friends of his in the 
far-away city how to live the new way day by 
day in the difficult world. He told them not 
to overcome evil by doing evil in return but to 
overcome it by being good and by doing good. 



142 ST. PAUL THE HERO 

He told them not to worry, or fret, or be dis- 
turbed, when things were hard and difficult, 
but to keep calm and steady and full of faith 
in the love of God, and when they had done 
the best they could, to leave it all with God. 
They were, as far as possible, to live in peace 
and love with all kinds of people and no mat- 
ter what others did to them, they were to go 
right on loving them and doing good to them. 
When he had sent off his great epistle, and 
had done all that he could to strengthen the 
church in Corinth and had received a large 
collection for Jerusalem and had gathered his 
friends around him, Paul said farewell to 
Corinth and started on his return journey, ac- 
companied by a number of companions. He 
went back through Macedonia — Bercea, 
Thessalonica, Philippi — and then across the 
iEgean to Troas where he had first heard the 
call to go to Europe. There must have been a 
church there on "the plains of windy Troy," 
for Paul remained seven days and held meet- 



"READY TO BE BOUND" 143 

ings far into the night, but we do not know 
very much about this church by the Simois 
River — only that one of the young men there 
went to sleep while the meeting was going on 
and fell out of a window in the third story to 
the ground ! Here at Troas Paul found again 
his old friend, the writer of the Diary — "the 
We Narrative" — who joined the party for the 
journey to Jerusalem. They went part of the 
way by land and part of the way by sea, stop- 
ping at Assos and Mitylene, touching at the 
famous island of Samos, and disembarking at 
Miletus. Here at Miletus, the leaders of the 
church at Ephesus came down to see the man 
whom they had learned to love, to hear his 
message and to say farewell to him. It was 
probably not safe for Paul to go to Ephesus 
with its beasts. There were too many dangers 
there for him. After all his years of work and 
his perils in that city it was a joy to see the 
men and women with whom he had lived and 
laboured and to have one more chance to 



144 ST. PAUL THE HERO 

speak to them about the highest things in life. 
It was a very solemn time as they gathered on 
the seashore and Paul told them of the 
troubles and dangers that lay before them 
and before him. He then told them that they 
would never see each other again. They 
loved him as though he had been a father to 
each one and they all wept as he left them to 
go into the ship to sail for Syria. As they 
went on their way Paul realised, from what 
he heard at every port wherq the ship stopped, 
that it would be very dangerous for him in 
Jerusalem. He had not been in the Holy City 
since the great conference there with Peter 
and James and John. Since that time tremen- 
dous things had happened across the world. 
Paul had succeeded, but the more he suc- 
ceeded the more the Jews hated him. They 
had made trouble for him in every city. 
They had come to regard him as a traitor and 
as the enemy of their race and they were 
eager to get rid of him forever. He knew 



"READY TO BE BOUND" 145 

how they felt. He saw the danger ahead. 
He understood that if he went to Jerusalem it 
would be like going into the lion's mouth. 
But he was determined to go, danger or no 
danger, for Paul was a hero. He had a great 
gift to carry up to the poor and needy Chris- 
tians in Jerusalem and he must have thought 
that he could win them over and make them 
see his truth at last. He believed that this 
was the greatest opportunity of his life. Per- 
haps now, after all the wonderful work 
around the iEgean Sea he might be able to 
make his own people see the truth that had 
meant so much to the Greeks and to the Gala- 
tians. Perhaps now he could join both 
branches together — those who were Jewish 
Christians and those who were Gentile-Chris- 
tians — and have one great world church with 
no division in it. It was worth trying any- 
how. It was worth any kind of risk. The 
great gift would soften their hearts and he 
would plead with them, and then it would be 



146 ST. PAUL THE HERO 

done! When prophets on the way told Paul 
how dangerous the risk was, he said to them : 
"Do not talk to me of danger. Do not try to 
change my course. I am ready, not only to 
be bound in Jerusalem, but if necessary to 
die there for this cause" — and on he went, like 
the hero he was. 

He very soon found that he was in the midst 
of enemies. James told him that there were 
many thousands of Christian-Jews who had 
heard serious charges against him, how he no 
longer kept the law of Moses and how he 
taught his converts that they did not need to 
become Jews, or to do the things which all 
good Jews considered necessary and he showed 
Paul how stern they were sure to be toward 
him. 

He had hardly begun to live in Jerusalem 
when some Jews discovered him in the city. 
They gave a cry and raised a mob and rushed 
at him and seized him. They were so furious 
that they nearly killed him on the spot, but 



"READY TO BE BOUND" 147 

a Roman captain with a troop of soldiers came 
up just in time to rescue him and to carry him 
away to the military castle where the mob 
could not get at him. But he could hear them 
cry and shout: "Away with him! away with 
him!" 



XIX 

IN THE PRISON AT C^SAREA 

STANDING on the steps of the castle, with 
the angry, surging people in front of him Paul 
beckoned for silence and then spoke to the 
most difficult audience he ever addressed. He 
calmly told them the story of his life. He 
gave them an account of that great moment 
on the road to Damascus when Jesus met him 
and called him to a new life and a new mis- 
sion. He explained to them how he tried to 
tell the good news to his own people and how 
God sent him to the great world of Gentiles. 
Then, all of a sudden, the people cried out in 
a fury: "Away with such a fellow from the 
earth." They threw of! their garments and 
would have ended his life in a moment if they 
could have reached him. It was another 

148 



THE PRISON AT CjESAREA 149 

scene like the one which occurred when Jesus 
was on his way to Calvary, and when Stephen 
was being hurried out of the gates of Jerusa- 
lem and Paul himself held the garments of 
the men who threw the stones. 

This time the crowd was powerless for they 
could not get their victim. The soldiers 
guarded him and took him into the castle 
where he was to be scourged, that is beaten 
with rods. The soldiers tied Paul up to the 
wall with thongs and were ready to begin the 
terrible scourging when he quietly asked the 
centurion if it was lawful to scourge a Roman 
citizen who had not been found guilty of any 
crime. The centurion went out and told the 
chief captain that Paul was a Roman, and he 
immediately stopped the scourging. The 
next day Paul had an opportunity to address 
the great council of the Jews in the presence 
of Ananias, the high-priest, but the council 
divided in their opinion of Paul, some approv- 
ing of him and some disapproving, until they 



ij;o ST. PAUL THE HERO 

nearly tore him in pieces in their excitement. 
Once more the soldiers saved him by rush- 
ing in and carrying him away to the castle. 
Meantime, a band of men got together and 
formed a secret plot to kill Paul and have 
done with him. This time it was not the 
Roman soldiers who saved him. It was his 
nephew. Paul, we remember, had a sister in 
Jerusalem. And in some way her son dis- 
covered this plot. He got into the castle and 
told his uncle, who brought him to a cen- 
turion and the centurion took the young man 
to the chief captain where he told all he knew 
of the plot. The brave boy saved his uncle's 
life, for the chief captain, when he heard the 
boy's story, ordered two hundred soldiers and 
seventy horsemen and two hundred spearmen 
to take Paul by night to Caesarea, where the 
Roman governor had his home and head- 
quarters and where Paul would be safe until 
his trial was over. He was taken at first to 
Herod's palace, though we may be pretty sure 



THE PRISON AT CiESAREA 151 

that the part in which Paul lived was more 
like a prison than a palace, but this wonderful 
man had something in his soul which changed 
even prisons into palaces. 

Soon after his arrival, Ananias, the high- 
priest, with a lawyer named Tertullus, came 
down to Caesarea to lay before Felix, the 
Roman governor, the charges against Paul. 
Tertullus made a speech charging Paul with 
being "a pestilent fellow," "a mover of insur- 
rections" up and down the empire wherever 
he travelled. He said Paul was "a ringleader 
of the Nazarenes" and that he did things con- 
trary to the laws and customs of the Jews. 
Tertullus made out as bad a case as he could 
and the other Jews who had come down with 
him added whatever they could think of 
against the prisoner. 

Then Felix made a sign that Paul might 
speak in his own defence. He declared, in 
calm and persuasive words that he had never 
wilfully stirred up the crowd, or encouraged a 



152 ST. PAUL THE HERO 

riot. He told the governor that his whole 
business in the world was to live the way of 
life that God had revealed as the true way. 
A little later Paul spoke again before Dru- 
silla, a Jewess, who was Felix's wife. He 
spoke so powerfully this time of righteousness 
and self-control and the perfect way of life 
and of the future of joy and woe, that the old 
Roman governor trembled as he listened. 
But he did not change his life. He was weak 
of will and he had woven a chain of habits 
which he could not break. He had heard 
that Paul had brought great sums of money to 
Jerusalem and he hoped that Paul would of- 
fer a large bribe for his liberty so that Felix 
kept him in prison two years. Felix saw him 
occasionally and gave him a chance to offer 
a bribe, which never was offered! Thus two 
long years dragged by. Paul was longing to 
go on with the work that had been changing 
the world. He was eager to see his old 
friends and to help them in their troubles, but 



THE PRISON AT C^SAREA 153 

all the time he was fast bound with chains in 
the strong prison at Caesarea. There is in the 
Second Epistle to Timothy a fragment of a 
letter which Paul may have written from 
Caesarea. He asks Timothy to bring him the 
cloak which he left at Troas. The prison by 
the sea was a cold place. And more touching 
still, he asks him to bring his books — I wish 
we knew the titles of these books — and his 
pieces of parchment, so that he could write 
letters to his churches and to his friends. 
After two years had dragged by, there came a 
change of governors. Porcius Festus suc- 
ceeded Felix. The Jerusalem Jews made a 
great effort to prejudice the new governor 
against Paul and he proposed to push the trial 
through at once and have the case settled. It 
was evident that Paul could hardly have a fair 
trial in Caesarea. The Jews were full of pas- 
sion against him,. They were ready to use all 
the ways known to them to secure his condem- 
nation and death. And Paul saw that he had 



154 ST. PAUL THE HERO 

little chance of escape in the local court, so 
that as the crisis approached he used his privi- 
lege as a Roman citizen and appealed to be 
tried before Caesar in Rome, and Festus im- 
mediately granted the appeal. 

Before the time came for Paul to start on 
his momentous journey to Rome, King 
Agrippa and his wife Bernice came to Caesarea 
to bring greetings to the new governor and 
they heard from Festus of the famous prisoner 
who had appealed to Caesar. King Agrippa 
very much desired to see Paul and to hear 
him speak and Festus arranged for Agrippa 
to hear him. The king sat on a throne with 
much splendour. All the distinguished per- 
sons of the court were there. Soldiers with 
helmets and with the Roman eagles were sta- 
tioned round the hall. And into the midst 
Paul was led by his guard and then was 
given permission to speak. It was a great 
moment for the prisoner. His one thought 
was to make some of these people under- 



THE PRISON AT CiESAREA 155 

stand his great message. Once more he told 
the story of his life and how the light had 
shined upon him at Damascus and how he 
had obeyed the heavenly message which came 
to him then. He thought he might make 
the king Agrippa see that God always meant 
to send His Son to bring light and life to 
the world and he was telling him about 
the great prophecies in the Old Testament 
when suddenly Festus interrupted. He told 
Paul that he was wild and deluded, that he 
had thought over these things until he had 
lost his reason. Unmoved Paul answered and 
said "I am not deluded. I am calm and 
sober. I am talking about things which are 
absolutely certain and real. King Agrippa 
knows that these things are so." Then turn- 
ing to the king, he said, "King Agrippa dost 
thou believe what our prophets have said? I 
know that thou must believe." 

Then king Agrippa found it difficult to an- 
swer. It would not do to have a prisoner go 



156 ST. PAUL THE HERO 

on talking that way to a king and yet this pris- 
oner seemed to be right. King Agrippa 
shrugged his shoulders and said: "With a 
very little argument you seem to think you can 
make me a Christian!" Paul with dignity 
raised his chained hands and said : "Whether 
my argument is little or great, I would to 
God that not only thou but everybody here 
who hears me speak to-day might feel what I 
feel, and see what I see, and have the kind of 
life I have and become such a person as I am 
— only without these chains which are on my 
hands!" 

After Paul had retired King Agrippa said 
to Festus: "If this man had not appealed to 
Caesar he might have been set free." 



XX 

THE STORMY JOURNEY TO ROME 

The journey from Caesarea to Rome was at 
best a long and dangerous one. Paul was ac- 
customed to the sea, for he had taken sea voy- 
ages ever since his early youth. He had al- 
ready been shipwrecked three times and once 
he had clung to a piece of the wreck for 
twenty-four hours before he was rescued. 
But this was the first time he had gone on 
board ship as a prisoner and it was a new ex- 
perience to be at sea in the charge of soldiers. 
The change from the prison in Caesarea to the 
ship was, however, a welcome one, and now 
at last he was going to Rome and, he hoped, 
to freedom. 

He was in the charge of the Augustan co- 
hort, with Julius for centurion and there were 
other prisoners besides himself. A little band 

157 



158 ST. PAUL THE HERO 

of friends attended him and among them was 
the writer of the famous "We-Diary" who 
has given us a wonderful account of this jour- 
ney. The ship touched first at Sidon where 
the good-hearted centurion allowed Paul to 
go on shore, to visit his friends and to have a 
good home meal, which must have been a 
welcome change after the long tedious period 
of prison fare. Then they sailed under the 
lee of Cyprus and skirted the shore of Paul's 
beloved Cilicia. There were the mountains 
of his childhood in the distance — Amanus in 
the east, Taurus in the west. He could see the 
gleaming of the Cydnus on its way to the sea 
and imagination pictured the beautiful city on 
both banks of the river where he played and 
dreamed as a boy — the city he would never 
see again. Next came Pamphylia on whose 
shores he had landed years before and his 
mind ran on over the hills to a precious group 
of churches in the cities of Galatia. 

From the city of Myra in the province of 



STORMY JOURNEY TO ROME 159 

Lycia they found an Alexandrian ship sailing 
for Italy and the centurion transferred his 
prisoners to it. They went far to the south 
of the iEgean, around whose shores the great 
work of Paul's life had been done and where 
now groups of friends were praying for him. 
The ship took them to the south of the great 
island of Crete and finally the wind forced 
them to put into Fair Havens near the middle 
of the island. Paul warned the centurion not 
to go on because of the certain danger of the 
voyage in the stormy season, but the master of 
the vessel was determined to have the ship 
sail and as soon as a favourable wind appeared 
they launched forth. But the ship had not 
been long at sea when a Mediterranean hurri- 
cane struck it and drove it on through the 
desperate waters. The ship was wrenched 
and twisted by the fury of the storm and it 
leaked seriously so that the sailors were com- 
pelled to put undergirding around it to 
tighten up the seams. In the fearful danger 



160 ST. PAUL THE HERO 

they threw overboard the freight which the 
ship was carrying and finally they threw out 
the tackling and furniture of the ship to make 
it as light as possible. For fourteen days and 
nights they floundered about in the Sea of 
Adria at the mercy of the wind and the 
boisterous billows. No sun appeared by day 
and the nights were appallingly dark. Fear 
lay on everybody except one and all hope was 
gone in the minds of everybody but one. This 
one man had no fear and he was full of hope 
and confidence. He had never seen battles 
such as the centurion with his cohort had been 
through, but he had passed through great ex- 
periences and he had learned to trust God 
absolutely. He had received five terrible 
beatings from the Jews; three times he had 
been given the Roman scourge. He had been 
in many prisons. He had faced death again 
and again on his journeys. He had often 
been where no escape seemed possible, when 
an unexpected door had opened and he had 



STORMY JOURNEY TO ROME 161 

gone on in safety. He was the man, then, for 
this dreadful hour. He had the hero spirit 
and he could calm the others and kindle their 
courage. 

Suddenly he stepped forth on deck and 
spoke to the men: "Be full of cheer and 
hope . We shall come through. My God has 
told me so. And I believe God. His I am. 
Him I serve and I know that He has given me 
all who sail with me in the ship. Not a life 
shall be lost!" 

Then when the sailors had sounded and had 
found the water growing shallow they threw 
out four anchors and waited for morning to 
come. We have just seen that Paul had four 
anchors, too — four anchors to his soul: "I 
believe God"; "His I am"; "Him I serve"; 
"He has given me those who sail with me." 
In the morning they loosened the four anchors 
and let the sea drive the ship toward the 
shore at a place where two seas met and 
formed a cove, and there they beached it. 



1 62 ST. PAUL THE HERO 

The force of the waves broke the ship to pieces 
and the soldiers were for killing all the pris- 
oners but the centurion had learned to respect 
Paul and was determined to save him, so that 
he allowed everybody on board to swim or 
float to shore and all were saved. The island 
turned out to be Malta, south of Sicily. Here 
the ship's crew and the soldiers and the pris- 
oners spent three months. Paul was able here 
once again to preach to the people and he 
worked wonders among them. At the end of 
the three months they started out again on the 
treacherous sea to complete the journey. The 
ship on which they sailed from Malta bore 
the sign of "the Twins," Castor and Pollux, 
who were supposed by the Romans to be the 
guardians of sailors. The new ship touched 
at Syracuse, the famous capital of Sicily, 
where Plato had come with his wisdom, and, 
after two days, it brought its precious load 
into port at Puteoli, near Naples, in sight of a 
beautiful, quiet mountain peak, named Vesu- 



STORMY JOURNEY TO ROME 163 

vius, which, a few years later, was to spout 
lava and cinders over the towns lying on the 
shores of this wonderful blue bay. Here in 
the Italian port, Paul found a group of Chris- 
tian believers who greatly refreshed him, and 
his kind centurion allowed him to stay there 
an entire week. These Christians at Puteoli 
were the first people in Italy to hear the great 
teacher of the new way of life. Then on foot 
or by horses, the strange troop wound up the 
glorious valley, leading from Puteoli to 
Rome. At the Forum of Appius, about ten 
miles out of the imperial city, a band of 
Roman Christians came to meet him as though 
he were a hero coming in triumph to their 
city. They found a prisoner kept by sol- 
diers. When Paul saw these devoted Chris- 
tian men coming to share their love and fel- 
lowship with him he forgot all about being 
a prisoner. Here were dear friends who 
loved him and that was enough. The long 
and arduous journey of many months was 



1 64 ST. PAUL THE HERO 

over. Here in front was Rome. Nero might 
be there, and his court and prison might be 
waiting for him, but the most important thing 
was that there was a church of Christ in Rome 
and Paul could see the members and make the 
church grow larger! 



XXI 

THE TRIUMPH OF THE HERO 

" I AM not ashamed of the gospel of 
Christ," Paul had said in his letter to Rome. 
"It is the power of God." Rome was the 
most powerful city the world had ever seen 
up to that time. Its armies had gone every- 
where and this city on the Tiber had become 
the conqueror of all lands and peoples. Out 
from the capital of the empire the roads ran 
like the spokes of a wheel from the hub, and 
the soldiers marched forth from this centre 
to subdue countries and to hold them wher- 
ever the emperor wished to send them. Here 
was power which all, eyes could see and which 
all men could feel. Over against this visible 
power, Paul knew that he had discovered a 
new kind of power. It could not be seen as 
armies could be seen, but it changed lives and 

165 



1 66 ST. PAUL THE HERO 

it remade cities and it upheld and supported 
men and women in the hardest suffering and 
trial. Here was this man now bound with 
chains, guarded by soldiers, a prisoner of the 
emperor's, weak, frail, alone, but in reality 
the bravest, strongest, most powerful man in 
the whole empire. Nero is dead now. His 
empire has passed away. But Paul is still a 
mighty power in the world. Eight million 
copies of his letters are sold every year. 
Everybody reads what he wrote and he still 
goes on working in the world as though he 
were yet alive and speaking. 

At first, when he came to Rome, he was 
treated kindly and was allowed to have his 
own house, though of course he was under the 
care of Roman soldiers. The guard was 
changed every day so that he constantly had 
new soldiers by him. It gave him a splendid 
chance to preach his gospel to the Roman 
army, for he would surely never let a soldier 
stay all day by him without telling him of 



THE TRIUMPH OF THE HERO 167 

Christ. It must have worked, too, for, in his 
letter to the church at Philippi, he writes that 
"the saints in Caesar's househould send greet- 
ings," and he also says that he has been able to 
spread the news of Christ through the whole 
praetorian guard. Perhaps he did more as a 
prisoner than he could have done as a travel- 
ling preacher. Paul was the kind of man that 
would appeal to soldiers. They could see at 
once that he was as brave as they were, and 
they could feel that he was in his way a hero, 
and they were ready to listen to his story and 
we may be sure that many of them went back 
to Caesar's palace changed into "saints." 
Others went out with the army and carried 
the truth about Christ into the lands where 
they were stationed. "It has all happened 
right," Paul wrote to his friends. "My 
chains have helped to spread the gospel!" 

During the first part of the time in Rome, 
Paul expected to be freed. He thought his 
trial would come off favourably, and he was 



1 68 ST. PAUL THE HERO 

full of hope. In this early period he wrote 
a beautiful letter to his friend Philemon, who 
lived in Asia. He told this friend that he 
expected soon to be free and he playfully 
added you can get me a lodging, for I shall 
be coming to Asia before long. He had 
found in Rome a run-away slave that belonged 
to Philemon. He had told the slave, who was 
named Onesimus, about Christ and Onesimus 
had become a follower of Christ. Paul sent 
him back to his master, changed from a slave 
to a brother and Paul calls him his "own son 
in Christ." This was the way Paul's gospel 
worked for all kinds of people. It made 
them new men, and it gave them a new rela- 
tionship to everybody. One day a poor, mean 
slave, the next day a brother and a son! In 
this letter Paul calls himself an old man. He 
writes: "I am Paul the aged." He could 
not have been very old in years — probably not 
more than fifty-five — but his years in prison 
and the terrible hardships, through which he 



THE TRIUMPH OF THE HERO 169 

had been, had left their mark upon him and 
he seemed old before he was old. 

As time went on, and Paul had had two 
years in "his own hired house/' he seems to 
have been taken to some imperial prison, per- 
haps to the famous Mamertine prison, which 
was deep underground, and very dark, cold 
and damp. It became more and more evi- 
dent that the wonderful prisoner was not to go 
free again. His friends in Philippi remem- 
bered him and sent one of their number all 
the way to Rome to comfort him and to carry 
to him the things he needed in his hard prison 
life. He was very deeply touched by their 
love and kindness and he wrote an extraor- 
dinary letter of thanks to his first Christian 
believers in Europe — those men of Macedonia 
who called him to them. He told them that 
he did not know whether the outcome of his 
trial was to be life or death, but that he was 
"ready" for either event that might come. "I 
have learned" he wrote, "how to be contented 



170 ST. PAUL THE HERO 

with what comes to me. I know how to be 
successful and how to be defeated. I know 
how to be happy when I am full and I know 
how to be happy when I am hungry. I can 
do everything with Christ's help." "I want 
you," he told his friends, "to learn the secret. 
I want you to rejoice and again to rejoice, and 
evermore to REJOICE." 

What happened at last, we do not know. 
Nobody has written for us any "We-Narra- 
tive" about the last prison days and about the 
trial in Caesar's court. Some people think 
that the great prisoner got his freedom and 
went on for many years doing missionary 
work across the world, travelling with Tim- 
othy and Titus and the other helpers, and 
preaching in new lands and in new cities. 
But I do not think so. I think that he never 
left Rome again. The Jews who were op- 
posed to him had a very strong case against 
him. They could prove that in almost every 
city in the empire where Paul had been there 



THE TRIUMPH OF THE HERO 171 

had been riots and uprisings and they could 
make it seem that Paul was the cause of these 
things. He was one lone man with a whole 
multitude of furious enemies and in Caesar's 
court the testimony against him would count 
for very much, and would weigh very heavily. 
It seems most likely that the trial ended with 
a decision against the great missionary. If 
he was condemned, as I believe he was, then 
he was soon after executed, and, as a Roman 
citizen, he would be put to death with the 
sword. That is the steady tradition in Rome 
that he was taken out to the place now called 
the Three Fountains and there beheaded. 
We shall probably never know any more about 
the end of our hero's life. 

One great fragment of a letter has been pre- 
served for us. It does not tell anything about 
the prison, or the trial, or the manner of the 
death. But it does tell about his courage, his 
calmness, his faith and his noble spirit. It is 
a letter to Timothy, his young friend, written 



172 ST. PAUL THE HERO 

by "Paul the aged." It says : "I am already 
being offered up now, and the time of my de- 
parture is come. I have fought the good 
fight. I have finished my course. I have 
kept the faith. Henceforth there is laid up 
for me a crown of righteousness." At the 
end, as always through his life, he was 
"ready." Unmoved and undefeated, and, we 
may be sure, with his face shining, as Stephen's 
shone that memorable day in Paul's youth, he 
went to meet his death. They could kill his 
body with their sharp sword, but they could 
not crush his spirit or conquer his faith and 
hope. When his eyes could no longer see 
Rome with its capitol and its coliseum, he 
could see his Christ, and when his ears could 
not hear the shouting and the cries of the peo- 
ple, he could hear a gentle voice say: "Well 
done, good and faithful servant, enter into the 
joy of thy Lord." The hero got home with 
God at last. 

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